12 February 2018
AA Collections Talk
This lecture takes the Modern Egypt Project at the British Museum as a starting point to charting the history of modern design in twentieth century Egypt. While the objects were collected by the museum to tell stories about modern and contemporary Egyptian society, they also stand as design objects from a region often omitted from the history of design. Curator Mohamed Elshahed will shed light on the history of modern design in Egypt focusing on everyday objects as well as architecture. Trained as an architect, Elshahed’s multidisciplinary practice focuses on the history of modernism in Egypt through architecture, images, and objects. As the Modern Egypt Project curator, he is responsible for building a new collection of material culture from the past century in Egypt.
