Mariam Elnozahy

Mariam Elnozahy is a curator, researcher, and writer. She currently serves as the Artistic Director of Konsthall C in Stockholm, Sweden where her program “Sacred Spaces” (2024-2026) invites artists to address questions of religion and society. She is also currently co-curating the next edition of the MUNCH Triennale titled Almost Unreal. Previously, she ran exhibitions and programs at the Townhouse Gallery for Contemporary Art in Cairo (2016-2020). She has also curated exhibitions in Copenhagen, London, Oslo, Uppsala, Amsterdam, Jeddah, and Basel and ran workshops in Tunis and Tangiers. These works often address histories of globalization, development, and resource extraction. She also supports artists at various stages of conceptualization and production of artistic works. Her project titled “Whose Open Society? Understanding Neoliberalism and the Economics of Artistic Production in the Middle East and former Eastern bloc” was presented at the Kunsthalle Wien, the Warsaw Biennale, and the Matter of Art Biennale in Prague. Her writing has been published in Frieze Magazine, The Markaz Review, Hyperallergic, and MadaMasr. She was in residency at the Jan Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, NL from 2022-2023 conducting research in the archive of Royal Dutch Shell to understand the relationship between arts and extractive industries in the twentieth century. She holds a Masters degree in the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT.

Art After Defeat

This presentation examines the role of art in the wake of political defeat, proposing “defeat” as a paradigm for understanding artistic and cultural production. I focus on three paradigmatic moments in history spanning different geographies: the Arab defeat of 1967 and its transformation of cultural production in Egypt from socialist realism under Nasser to the art of the liberalized, post-1967 defeat era; the post-2014 defeat of Egypt’s revolutionary moment; and the 2024 symbolic defeat of Swedish internationalism with NATO accession. These moments, separated by geography and time, are linked by a persistent question: how do artists respond when political horizons collapse? I will highlight projects that I undertook at the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo, Konsthall C in Stockholm, as well as a long-standing art historical research project where I look at the work of Egyptian artist Evelyn Ashamallah. By attending to the specter of defeat, I argue for understanding art as a site where political loss is documented, metabolized, and perhaps even refused.