In Cairo, an Art Exhibit Invokes the Past and Glosses Over the Present
“Forever Is Now” at the Pyramids of Giza courts the contemporary art world.
Illustration: Maggie Cowles for Bloomberg
Until last month, the sculptor Marie Khouri hadn’t been back to Egypt in more than two decades. As soon as she arrived, she set up an installation of three bench-sized Arabic letters on the sands of the Pyramids of Giza that brightly read, “I love.”
Born in Cairo, Khouri was raised in Beirut until the Lebanese civil war forced her family to move to Vancouver in the 1970s. Perched on one of her ice-white sculptures, she told me the piece is an extension of a body of work called “Let’s sit and talk,” which she first developed in 2014 in response to ongoing conflict in the Middle East. “This was related to my life in Lebanon and to how history repeats and repeats,” she said.