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Whose Modernism? An Exhibition Review of Mohamed ElShahed’s Cairo Modern

By Marianne Dhenin and Mohamed Gamal-Eldin

(All image credits belong to Gamal-Eldin)

The first-floor exhibition space, photographed from its entrance, has pink walls and black-cased lightbox panels with white text and black-and-white backlit images of Modernist works of Egyptian architecture and urban planning.
The view upon entering Elshahed’s “Cairo Modern” exhibition at New York City’s Center for Architecture. Most of the featured photographs have been reprinted from al-Emara magazine.

On a tree-lined side street just around the corner from Washington Square Park – and close enough to Zooba, the hip Cairo- and now New York-based Egyptian street food restaurant, to warrant traipsing over for lunch– scenes from everyday life in Cairo are on display at New York City’s Center for Architecture. 

A backlit black-and-white image at the center of the room shows a woman in a striped shirt and knee-length skirt, flanked by palm trees and bamboo lawn furniture, the sort that’s still ubiquitous at sporting clubs and cafés across Egypt, posing for the camera on the Nile’s Mounira Island. A thirty-one-story high-rise towers in the background. Another image shows a pair of students seated in those same bamboo chairs on the lawn outside the American University in Cairo’s six-story Science Building, its large glass windows protected by an elaborate brise soleil.

Image of the now-demolished AUC Science Building, a six-story, bar-shaped building with large glass windows, shaded by a brise soleil of small rectangular openings. Two students converse in the image’s foreground, sitting in bamboo chairs on the lawn in front of the building.
Panel from Cairo Modern. A pair of students talk on the lawn of the now-demolished AUC Science Building. When the university moved to a new campus in New Cairo, it sold off valuable land downtown allowing for such demolitions. This type of distinct architecture has not been preserved well in twenty-first-century Cairo.

While the scenes feel timeless, the focus of the exhibition is not the characters at all. Instead, the focus is on the built environment they inhabit. The images have been brought together, in part, to challenge the anthropocentrism of history and underscore the impermanence of modernist buildings in this city on the Nile. The Sabet Sabet Building, built in 1958, which rises in the background of the image from Mounira, still stands in Garden City. But the Science Building on AUC’s downtown campus, designed by architect Medhat Hassan Shaheen and built in 1966, has been abandoned and demolished, victim to what academics call Cairo’s urbicide.

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