ART BASEL

A solo presentation by Hana El-Sagini

Booth M18

16-21 June 2026

For Art Basel Statements 2026, Gypsum is pleased to present a solo booth by Egyptian multidisciplinary artist Hana El-Sagini. For this presentation, titled Plot Twist, she creates a sculptural installation composed of braided bronze sculptures and wall reliefs that creep, branch, and erupt across the booth’s surfaces. Emerging from the artist’s own experience of illness, the work  reflects on our capacity for rupture, renewal, and growth.

Working across sculpture, installation, and painting, El-Sagini’s practice often explores memory, trauma, and loss through the reimagining of everyday places and inherited stories. Though classically trained as a painter, she consistently moves across mediums, with material and scale serving as a central element in her work. Her earlier projects have ranged from life-sized painted  wood cut-outs reconstructing rooms from her family home after the loss of her father to immersive installations of hospital waiting rooms composed of ceramic body parts. In this new body of work, she turns to bronze for the first time, working with the same Cairo foundry that cast sculptures by her late grandfather, Gamal El-Sagini, a pioneering Egyptian modernist sculptor.

At the heart of the booth, a radiating installation unfolds through an expanding network of braids. Twisted, organic forms spread across the walls and rise from the floor, hovering between bodily and vegetal registers. They may evoke hair, roots, branches, veins, or the nervous system. Their movement is uneven–something between living and dying: dense and dormant in some places, more active and proliferating in others, as strands converge, diverge, and generate new paths.

The braid is a central motif in El-Sagini’s thinking around fragility and endurance. Hair, both part of the body and capable of being severed from it, becomes a charged site of attachment, loss, and regeneration. Across cultures, braiding carries associations of intimacy, care, and community. For El-Sagini, the braid took on renewed significance during her breast cancer treatment in 2022, when hair loss became inseparable from vulnerability, survival, and transformation. By casting braids in bronze, she gives lasting form to something inherently delicate and impermanent, turning a sign of loss into one of resilience.

Rather than affirming bronze’s traditional associations with monumentality, El-Sagini subdues the material’s authority. Muted grey patinas lend the works a restrained, almost bodily presence, suggesting age, fatigue, wisdom, and survival. In doing so, she shifts bronze away from triumph and toward a quieter register of endurance. The work proposes a sculptural environment in which the loss is not final, and where life is continually capable of regenerating itself.

BASEL SOCIAL CLUB

A solo presentation by Taha Belal

Hallway O.ABC

14-20 June 2026

Taha Belal’s practice draws on the visual language of everyday bureaucracy, shaped by his experience working in his family’s business, amid papers, laminates, advertising materials, and fluorescent-lit office interiors. Repurposing these familiar materials, he subjects them to painstaking processes of cutting and redacting that expose their constructed nature while revealing a latent expressiveness.

For Basel Social Club, Belal’s work consists of carbon transfers onto receipts, magazine pages, and recycled paper. The transferred images are based on cropped gestures and closeups of hands sourced from newspapers, advertisements, and circulating media imagery: men in suits shaking hands, pointing at microphones, clapping. Isolated through the transfer process, these gestures become fragmented signs of presentation, persuasion, and the choreography of power, thereby reflecting how images, authority, and communication circulate between business, media, and everyday life. 

Alongside these images, Belal incorporates French and Arabic SMS messages, WhatsApp exchanges, and fragments of automated corporate communication he receives on his local number, as well as his Egyptian SIM that he has kept after moving to France in 2021. Despite their personalised tone, these forms of correspondence remain fundamentally one-sided and detached. For example, the series’ title Unfinished Business (Bonjour je suis en vacances en Espagne) comes from an automated response sent by an electrician unable to repair the electricity at the artist’s grocery store, capturing the detached intimacy that runs throughout the work. By tracing, doubling, and pressing these texts by hand onto receipts, magazine pages, and carbon paper, Belal transforms impersonal digital exchanges into meticulous manual iterations. 

The transfers are scattered and pinned on a rectangular painted backdrop—recalling flyers pinned to notice boards—emphasising on how these ephemeral, functional images are often encountered in passing, imposing and yet forgotten.

Z FOR ZARAFA

A solo show by Lara Baladi

2 June - 23 September 2026

Gypsum is pleased to present Z for Zarafa, the first solo exhibition by Egyptian-Lebanese artist Lara Baladi at the gallery. Emerging from Anatomy of Revolution, her monumental web-based ABC of global protests (2019–ongoing,) the exhibition unfolds through a new body of work spanning tapestry, photography, and sculptural installation. For Baladi, the letter Z (“Zain” in Arabic) becomes an entry point into intertwined histories of migration, diplomatic exchange, and revolutions.

In Baladi’s sprawling alphabet, the letter Z stands for many words, including “Zarafa,” the giraffe gifted by Mohamed Ali to King Charles X of France in 1827. More than a diplomatic offering, Zarafa became a spectacle: a living emissary who traversed continents, empires, and imaginations. She sparked a cultural frenzy—hairstyles rose in imitation of her height, textiles echoed the markings of her coat, and her image proliferated across objects and decorative surfaces. For Baladi, however, Zarafa’s afterlife persists as both a diplomatic relic and a metaphor for displacement and forced migration.

The exhibition considers the absurdity of diplomatic exchange as an expression of persuasion and power. A monumental tapestry traces Zarafa’s journey from Sudan to Paris; a cabinet of curiosities gathers objects recalling bizarre ceremonial gifts exchanged between heads of state; scattered ceramic flies reference pharaonic medallions, a symbol of military achievement.

Beyond the political dimensions of cultural exchange, the works draw on biblical, contemporary, and personal stories of migration—stories embedded within the labor of making itself. Motifs from Noah’s Ark appear alongside a photograph of a foaming black sea, referencing the water as both passage and end, not just a route but a carrier of bodies, stories, and losses. For one tapestry, Baladi collaborated with Threads of Hope, an organization supporting marginalized Egyptian migrants, and refugee women. Through a series of workshops, participants translated their journey into drawings later incorporated into the artwork.

The exhibition is further contextualized within Anatomy of Revolution in the gallery’s viewing room, transformed into a classroom-like space where viewers can engage directly with its lexicon. Printed posters of another ABC primer rework the indoctrinating language of 1950s Arabic schoolbooks, while a school desk evokes both a site of learning and an operating table, where symbols of belonging to a nation, displacement and revolution, are dissected.

The exhibition emerges from a multi-year endeavor and through a wide network of collaborations, bringing together techniques and forms shaped by many hands: potters in Fayoum, blacksmiths in Imbaba, antiquaries in downtown Cairo, and embroiderers in Islamic Cairo, amongst others.

The exhibition is accompanied by The Anatomist, a publication co-produced by Gypsum and launched on the occasion of the exhibition. Its first issue is dedicated to the topic of migration broached through the story of Zarafa, bringing together newly commissioned texts on displacement, borders, exile, and return.

Lara Baladi (b.1969) is a Lebanese-Egyptian artist, archivist, writer and educator, recognized internationally for her multidisciplinary works. Her artistic practice spans photography, video, sculpture, architecture and multimedia installations. Driven by critical exploration of historical archives and popular visual culture, Baladi’s work examines the intersection of myth, memory, socio-political narratives, and the cyclical nature of history.

Read Lara Baladi’s full biography here