The Museum is open 11:00 – 19:00
Cinema is closed now
The Museum is open 11:00 – 19:00
Cinema is closed now
Lecture
Surrealism in Egypt: Toward a Transmodernist Paradigm. A Lecture by Sam Bardaouil
01.12.2026 18:00–19:30
An event as part of the exhibition's accompanying program In the Very Bowels of Changes: Surrealism and Antifascism
LOCATION
Auditorium
LANGUAGE
English
ADMISSION
Free thanks to a partnership with Audi Polska
Photo by Robert Głowacki
Surrealism is primarily associated with Europe. However, as the exhibition You Are at the Heart of Changes: Surrealism and Antifascism at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw demonstrates, the movement quickly spread beyond the continent, becoming a global phenomenon. As part of the public programme accompanying the exhibition, Sam Bardaouil, art historian, curator, and co-director of Hamburger Bahnhof – National Gallery of Contemporary Art in Berlin, will give a lecture on Surrealism in Egypt. Drawing on the history of Art et Liberté (Art and Freedom), an artistic collective founded in Cairo in 1938, he will show how modern art developed in different parts of the world not only in parallel, but also through mutual connections, influences, and exchanges that transcended cultural and national boundaries.
This lecture examines Surrealism in Egypt through the history of Art et Liberté, the Cairo-based collective founded in 1938, situating its artistic and intellectual interventions within a broader reconsideration of modernity. Drawing on Sam Bardaouil’s research and his contribution to the museum’s current exhibition catalogue, it proposes his critical framework of Transmodernisms as an alternative to interpretative models that position Eastern and Western art histories as separate or asynchronous trajectories. Rather than treating modernism as a geographically bounded or unidirectional phenomenon, this approach foregrounds networks of affinity, exchange, and formal negotiation through which artistic practices engaged with shared aesthetic and political questions across cultural and national boundaries. The lecture considers how Surrealism in Egypt complicates established narratives of modern art and opens up possibilities for a more relational and historically situated understanding of modernisms.