Sarah Rifky

Sarah A. Rifky is an art historian, curator, and writer. She holds a PhD in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Art and Architecture from MIT, where her doctoral research focuses on the co-emergence of art and infrastructure in Egypt in the fifties and sixties. Her curatorial practice has been deeply shaped by institution-building and pedagogical experimentation: she co-founded Beirut, an independent art space in Cairo; and co-initiated MASS Alexandria with Wael Shawky. She has served as Curatorial Agent for documenta 13 and as Senior Curator and Director of Programs at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Her writing engages questions of pedagogy, institutional critique, and the politics of cultural production, and has appeared in Art in America, Bidoun, The Exhibitionist, and Mada Masr, where she is a contributing editor. Her books include The Going Insurrection (2012) and several co-edited volumes. Recent essays include “On Being Held: Artworks as a History of Institutions,” in The Rise of Arab Art (Hatje Cantz, 2025); “Six Years of Crisis,” in Living to Learn: Art & Education for the Common Good (Inventory Press, 2026); and “Drawing Against the State: Ezz El-Din Naguib, Art, and Human Rights,” in the edited volume Arab Art and the Geography of Post-Imperialism (Barjeel Art Foundation, forthcoming).

A Practice Whose Form Has Not Yet Arrived: Curating After the Expanded Field

Twenty-five years after the expanded field reorganized curatorial practice, its vocabulary, expansion, discourse, knowledge production and criticality, has become institutionalized. By the time I entered the field, roughly fifteen years ago, the formation was already established: Documenta 11’s platforms, curatorial-studies programs, the educational turn had given “the curatorial” a language and a promise, which I inherited teaching seminars in a basement studio in Alexandria, and starting art spaces in Cairo, certain I was building institutions, contributing to a post-revolutionary cultural infrastructure. Egypt’s 2014 counter-revolution dismantled these spaces gradually, part of a broader collapse of the civic field. Reflecting now, I understand differently what I was building: latency, a practice whose form had not yet arrived, and might never arrive in the shape institutions require for recognition.
The vocabulary of “the curatorial” has not changed, even as the conditions it once described have. European cultural funding has receded while Gulf capital has entered cultural infrastructure at unprecedented scale, producing what I call neoroyalist cultural infrastructure. Institutions once expected to endure have disappeared, been absorbed, or reconfigured into assemblages of state approval and speculative capital that co-opt curatorial language for other ends.
Drawing on institutions no longer standing in Egypt, Townhouse, MASS Alexandria and Beirut among others, I consider latency, residual practice, and countercultural infrastructure as ways of accounting for what persists, mutates, is sublimated, or goes unrecognized when institutional form disappears. What kind of curatorial practice becomes possible once the institution is no longer its inevitable horizon?