Meet Egyptian-Armenian artist Anna Boghiguian, a lifelong wanderer whose work reflects a life shaped by migration, political upheaval, and an insatiable curiosity about the world. Speaking from Cairo, where she was born in 1946, Boghiguian revisits the sensory and cultural landscapes that shaped her artistic development: “It’s all about transformation and metamorphosis, which is part of life,” she says.
Growing up in Cairo, she recalls it as more open and permeable than it is today. “It was a different kind of Cairo than now because it was less populated and the air was cleaner,” she says, describing the environment that nurtured her early encounters with color, books and imagery. The 1952 revolution left a deep impression on her: “Suddenly the radio stopped the music, and it said: the king has been exiled,” she notes, remembering how political shifts became part of everyday life.
Boghiguian looks back on a life of artistic experimentation – working with watercolors, crayons, acrylics, encaustic and pigment – as well as the formative reading culture of Nasser-era Cairo, where existentialist philosophy circulated widely. Pop-up books from her childhood inspired her method of cutouts and drawing. Her way of working begins with extensive research, she explains, before moving into drawing, cutting and painting: “I have to do research to know about certain subjects so that I can develop this story in my mind.” From early on, she was fascinated with literature because it creates images in the mind. Words and sentences appear throughout her work: “I feel that words and images are the same thing because the line of the writing and the line of drawing and the line of music are the same; they are related,” she says. She frequently engages with literature and writers.
Travel – physical, mental and metaphorical – runs through her reflections. A lifelong wanderer, she describes movement as a means of transformation: “Everything that moves which is here goes there, and there it changes.” As a world traveler, Boghiguian often feels like an outsider wherever she goes: “I go to Armenia and I’m treated as a foreigner, and I come here [to Egypt] – they always think that I am not like an Egyptian because of the way I talk, the way I dress, the way I relate, the way I am.” This sensibility shapes her artworks, from her hand-painted sails to her large-scale narrative installations exploring buried histories, migration, trade and the unconscious. Her recent work, The Sunken Boat: A Glimpse into Past Histories (2025), becomes a metaphor for memory: “It’s like you dive in yourself to find yourself.”
Looking back at her life, she says: “I’m 80. I live very separately from the world in many ways. I have created my own illusory boundaries, and I have no living relatives around me, so I don’t have to be under their phenomena. The world is patriarchal, but one has to be aware of the patriarchy. So, you have to know how to navigate through it. You cannot change the world, but the world will get changed eventually.”
For Boghiguian, art remains a vital force. Drawing, she says, “has a power of giving me positive energy,” a practice that sustains her as she continues to examine the human condition through the prisms of history, displacement and personal mythology. But “the human condition,” she concludes, “is really my condition.”
Anna Boghiguian (born 1946) is an internationally renowned artist known for her drawings, cutouts, installations and narrative environments exploring global histories, colonialism, migration and psychological landscapes. Born in Cairo to an Armenian family, Boghiguian studied political science and economics at the American University in Cairo before relocating to Canada in the 1970s to pursue art and music studies. She has exhibited widely, including at documenta 13 (2012) and the Istanbul Biennial (2009), and her work is held in major museums and institutions worldwide. Anna Boghiguian received the Golden Lion at the 2015 Venice Biennale, and in 2024, she was awarded the prestigious Wolfgang Hahn Prize in Germany.
Christian Lund interviewed Anna Boghiguian in her studio in Cairo, Egypt, in October 2025. The film also features impressions from Anna Boghiguian’s exhibition The Sunken Boat at ARoS, Denmark, recorded in November 2025.
Camera & color grading: Rasmus Quistgaard
Editing: Nanna Dahm
Produced by: Christian Lund
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2025
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