FRIEZE LONDON

Dual presentation by Marianne Fahmy & Yasmine El Meleegy

Booth F16 | 15 - 19 October 2025

Gypsum is pleased to present a dual presentation of new works by Egyptian artists Yasmine El Meleegy and Marianne Fahmy. Through fractured sculptural reliefs and hand-stitched tapestries, the two address intertwined themes of labour and leisure through an exploration of the industrial and socio-political heritage of the port city of Alexandria, and the nationalist representations they bred. 

El Meleegy’s wall sculptures revisit the legacy of Egyptian sculptor and industrialist Fathy Mahmoud (1918–1982), celebrated for his monumental public works and a mid-20th-century porcelain factory once emblematic of post-independence aspirations to make art accessible to all. She reclaims shards of Mahmoud’s mass-produced porcelain—plates, mug handles, and ceramic fragments—assembling them into new compositions that echo motifs from his public murals. Drawing on an inaccessible mural located at the Port of Alexandria, where Mahmoud portrayed laborers, factory workers, farmers, and fishermen as symbols of national self-sufficiency, El Meleegy reorients historical scripts through a process of shattering and assembling. She recasts functional dinnerware as an art object, tying it to Mahmoud’s ideals of porcelain as a democratic medium. Using destruction and reconstruction in a single gesture, her mosaic-like reliefs refract nationalist struggles, transcending social and generational boundaries.

Fahmy’s new hand-stitched tapestries continue her exploration of Egypt’s environmental and socio-political future, focusing on the looming threat to Alexandria as rising sea levels and land subsidence risk rendering the city uninhabitable, forcing millions inland to satellite desert cities. Working in hand-embroidery on monk’s cloth, a material traditionally associated with leisurely craft, Fahmy configures images of possible futures while consulting the past. Her tapestries draw on diverse archival sources: vintage Alexandrian postcards from the 1960s, motifs and color palettes from ancient Greek frescos such as the Paestum “Tomb of the Diver”, and architectural plans of Alexandria’s cisterns. While rooted in Alexandria’s Hellenistic heritage, these works unfold against a desert landscape, suggesting gradual submersion and imagining daily life of a displaced Alexandrian community shaped by memory, migration, and adaptation. 

Layering historical monuments with contemporary narratives, both artists create tactile works that speak to Egypt’s socio-political shifts and environmental concerns. Their work stages a tension between labor and leisure, construction and destruction, envisioning a future that is anchored in the past. 

KEEP ME POSTED

A group show with Ebrahim Bahaa-Eldin, Taha Belal, Marianne Fahmy, and Maha Maamoun

For the final show of the season, Gypsum is pleased to present the group exhibition “Keep Me Posted”. This exhibition features works by Ebrahim Bahaa-Eldin, Taha Belal, Marianne Fahmy, and Maha Maamoun, and explores the circulation of written texts and modes of communication—whether personal, literary, or commercial. Spanning film, collage, photography, and print, the artists utilize letters, digital messages, literary sources, and advertisements to engage with how correspondences are mediated and how found texts are transformed into imagery.

Originally conceived as a film, Marianne Fahmy’s 31 Silent Encounters follows a non-linear dialogue drawn from a collection of letters exchanged between imprisoned communist activist Abdel Azim Anis and his wife during his four-year incarceration in the early 1960s. The displayed six film stills presents excerpts from these letters, pairing them with images of Alexandrian architectural facades that echo the places referenced in their correspondences. The work frames the couple’s personal epistolary relationship within the larger context of Egyptian political history while using architecture as an indication of social change. 

In the couple of years following the 2011 Egyptian revolution, Maha Maamoun noticed an incessant rise in the appearance of animals in news, talk shows, opinion pieces, literary texts and art projects. These animal appearances appeared to be a function of a collective urge to reflect on, revise, or conversely to re-assert, the status-quo and its catastrophic power relations. Her film Dear Animal focuses on two significant pieces of writing from that period: Sultan Qanun al-Wujud (Lord of the Order of Existence), a short story by Haytham El-Wardany, and a selection of the Facebook notes that director and producer Azza Shaaban was posting to her friends in Egypt, updating them on her state of mind and being in her self-exile in India. In both these texts, animals curiously appeared, not as metaphors, symbols or prosthetic tongues for an endangered political subject, but as indeterminate shifting forms with uncertain beginnings and ends.

Taha Belal’s Unfinished Business (bonjour ok pour demain) combines SMS messages, magazine advertisements and newspaper images on leftover paper. Following his move to France, Belal kept his Egyptian number, where he would receive unsolicited SMSes by Egyptian corporations and messages from Whatsapp groups—forms of correspondence that despite their often ‘personalised’ sentiment, do not provide a sense of reciprocity through their automated nature. Belal takes these images and texts from the various modes of communication and transfers them onto receipts, magazine pages, and carbon copy paper by tracing, doubling, and pressing–transforming these numeric forms into meticulous hand-written iterations.

Ebrahim Bahaa-Eddin’s photographic print Mirrors of the City documents a vacant billboard he would come across, and recurrently return to, in Cairo’s suburban outskirts. Captured at dawn, the wooden structure with its aluminum panels stands on a pile of sand and speaks to no one. The structure–once seemingly unavoidable with its consumerist message–becomes a means to examine the relationship between form and function, especially in public infrastructure. 

“Keep Me Posted” reflects on how language becomes entangled with consumerism, visibility, intimacy, and political history. The works in the exhibition draw from found and circulated texts to explore how communication is mediated, interrupted, and transformed. The films, photographs and collages reframe acts of reading and writing as visual gestures—forms of remembrance, and reinterpretation across media, and historical moments.