Yasmine El Meleegy is a multidisciplinary artist who occupies the roles of a sculptor, designer, museologist, restorer, and archaeologist. Working across sculpture, installation, and site-specific interventions, she engages with personal and collective memory—using replication, traditional craft, and mass production as tools to disrupt inherited histories and cultural legacies. 

In her early work, El Meleegy explored repair as a ritual, both physically and psychologically. Rites of Passage, her large-scale installation, was composed of mass-produced moulds of objects that belonged to her late mother—dolls, dinnerware, and other domestic artifacts found in her family home. In remaking and restoring these items in wax and cement, she transformed them into fragile yet industrial-looking relics, negotiating the boundary between private mourning and public spaces. The repetitive, labor-intensive process of casting, breaking, and recasting the objects became a cathartic act to work through her grief.

Although El Meleegy’s practice works with gestures of repair through painstaking acts of craftwork, her practice also deals with destruction as a means to reorient historical scripts. Exploring national and industrial histories, she works extensively with the legacy of Egyptian sculptor and industrialist Fathy Mahmoud, known for his monumental public sculptures and mid-20th-century porcelain factory. She repurposes shattered porcelain dinnerware remains—such as fragments of plates and mug handles—from Mahmoud’s porcelain range, reconstructing them into large-scale mosaic-like compositions. Reprising motifs from his works, she pieces together stories from her own memory with Mahmoud’s nationalist depictions of Egypt’s mid-century industrialization. Through this process, she interweaves state-sanctioned memory and the minutiae of our lived experience. 

Extending on industrial histories, El Meleegy’s sculptural installation Future Farms interrogates the current landscape of agricultural processes through the political dimensions of tomatoes. Playing with materiality and form, she showcases tomatoes as oversized, waxed, and hyper-perfect objects, reflecting on genetic modification as a mechanism for mass production and control. 

Beyond sculpture, El Meleegy intervenes in the fabric and histories of physical spaces. In her site-specific project Scaffolding a Familiar Epoch, she renovated Stephenson Pharmacy, a century-old British colonial-era pharmacy in Downtown Cairo, laboriously reconstructing lost objects and inserting newly crafted elements. Collaborating with local artisans, she revived lost features such as the pharmacy’s built-in watch and chandelier, relying on the owner’s recollections or, at times, fictionalizing details to bridge the gaps in history. By merging familial memory with craft revival, she reframes acts of repair as tools for countering the space’s colonial legacies.

Spanning monumental sculptures to meditative forms of craftwork, El Meleegy’s practice tends to memory and materiality. Weaving together industrial and personal histories, she challenges how history is inherited and transmitted.

Yasmine El Meleegy (b. 1991, Cairo) is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Cairo. She holds a BFA  in Painting from Helwan University (2013), and a Diploma in Multimedia from Ecole Supérieure des Beaux  Arts de Nimes (2014). Her work has been featured in solo and group shows across Cairo, Marseille, New  York, Thorsminde, Basel, Berlin, Yinchuan, Gwangju, Villorba, Venice, Milan, Jyvaskyla, Cape Town, Sang,  and Kolkata. Solo exhibitions include The Six Hundred Seventy Four Forms And A Dragon, FOR Space, Basel, Switzerland (2023); To Mend Is to Shatter, Gypsum Gallery, Cairo, Egypt (2023); Scaffolding a Familiar Epoch, Performative intervention at Stephenson pharmacy, Cairo, Egypt (2021); and Rites of Passage at Townhouse Factory, Cairo, Egypt (2018). El Meleegy is the recipient of AFAC’s Visual Arts Grant, Mophradat’s Artist Grant, Culture  Resource Al-Mawred Al-Thaqafy Artists Grant, and was nominated for the 7th edition of the Future  Generation Art Prize and the Follow Fluxus – After Fluxus grant, Wiesbaden, Germany.