Written by Lubna Akram

Aliaa Elgready, born in Alexandria in 1969, is an Egyptian multidisciplinary artist recognized for her innovative approach to mixed media, installation, and textile art. Her work delves into the emotional and psychological dimensions of contemporary life, often exploring how individuals navigate their internal worlds and external realities.

Raised in a culturally vibrant household in Alexandria, Elgready was the eldest of three children in a modest family that valued intellectual and artistic expression. Her father, Ahmad Elgready, worked in dye production, while her mother, Suad Hedaya, was a primary school teacher. The home was alive with cinema, poetry, music, and theatre – an environment that nurtured her early creative impulses. From a young age, she practiced drawing and developed a deep connection to the handmade, inspired by the sewing and embroidery she observed from her mother and grandmother, who passed down their skills and sensibilities.

Elgready earned a Bachelor’s degree in History from Alexandria University in 1992, while simultaneously pursuing her artistic training at the Alexandria Atelier under the mentorship of renowned artist Farouk Wahbah (1942-2019). Her studies under Wahbah were formative not only in technical training but in cultivating an independent artistic identity. He encouraged rigorous intellectual exploration, exposing her to abstract art, global movements, and conceptual thinking. Their mentorship fostered what Elgready calls “the building of character, not just technique”. Though she had initially applied to study fine arts, her formal path shifted toward historical studies. Nonetheless, she continued to cultivate her artistic skills outside the academic system, learning through direct engagement with artists and mentors across disciplines.

Over time, Elgready’s fascination with art and history deepened. Visits to museums, especially those focused on archaeology and funerary objects, sparked an enduring interest in the cultural rituals and everyday materials that shape human experience. Although she began her practice as a painter, Elgready soon grew disillusioned with brushes and pigment, seeking instead to ‘paint’ through physical materials – cardboard, rubble, iron, and construction debris collected from demolished buildings. Her early installations, often composed of these reclaimed elements, reflected a fascination with material transformation and embodied protest against rigid social norms and aesthetic conventions. Elgready’s travels through Europe further enriched this outlook, offering encounters with new artistic languages and modes of expression. Between 1990 and 1993, she began exhibiting her early paintings at the Alexandria Atelier and later showed her work at the Cairo Youth Salon through 1999, marking the start of a diverse and evolving practice.

Elgready’s artistic practice has evolved across a wide range of media, reflecting her experimental spirit and conceptual depth. Her body of work spans drawing, painting, installation, multimedia, performance, video art, jewelry design, and, more recently, textile-based practices. Textile specifically became a medium through which Elgready could integrate all aspects of her practice – material, memory, philosophy, and emotional inheritance. She speaks of it as the first material to touch the human body – a blanket woven by a mother or grandmother – imbuing it with intimate meaning. Her earliest textile works began as embroidered maps, inspired by the journeys and geographies of One Thousand and One Nights, and expanded into meditations on beauty, belief, and harmony. Throughout her varied works, Elgready draws inspiration from poetry, the complexities of human nature, and the expressive possibilities of material itself.

One of her earliest installations, Where It Is Buried, One of My Selves, 1995, draws on poems from writer and poet Gibran Khalil Gibran’s The Madman, 1918, to explore themes of identity and introspection. The piece – constructed from cardboard, charcoal, and construction debris – evokes a raw, almost archaeological atmosphere, symbolizing the layered and fragmented search for the self. It was awarded second place at the 7th International Cairo Biennial in 1995, marking a significant milestone in her early career.

Another notable work, Does It Need to Be Titled?, 2000, consists of three large, crumpled copper plates arranged in dialogue with the surrounding space. The folds and distortions of the metal reflect states of rupture, compression, and transformation. By presenting copper – usually associated with utility and durability – in a distressed and abstracted form, the installation investigates themes of human isolation and metamorphosis, while challenging the viewer’s expectations of function and material purpose.

Feminist thought and gender politics have played a central role in shaping Elgready’s artistic inquiry. Early in her career, she began experimenting with performance as a medium to interrogate power structures and societal expectations. In 1992, she staged two performances, Breaking Conceptual Stereotypes and Human Being + Machine, which challenged normative frameworks around embodiment, mechanization, and identity. Though few visual records of these works survive, they marked her early commitment to performative interventions and conceptual art grounded in social critique.

A more prominent example is her 2006 silent performance The Mustache, presented at the Dakar Biennial in Senegal. In this work, Elgready assumed the visual persona of a traditional Egyptian man – in customary male attire and a drawn-on mustache – subverting gender roles through physical transformation and public presence. The performance invited audiences to confront the rigid binaries of gender identity in Arab society. Rather than offering a surface-level critique, the piece proposed a layered exploration of the political and cultural codes that govern everyday interactions between men and women.

Continuing this inquiry, Elgready created Tent of Whisper, 2008, an immersive installation comprised of a circular, enclosed tent wrapped in soft gray quilts. Inside, vertical projections of men’s faces flicker across the interior fabric, placing male figures in a passive and objectified position. The intimate, almost confessional space invites a reconsideration of female spectatorship – reversing the male gaze and reflecting on the emotional dynamics that shape women’s relationships to desire, power, and voice. In shifting the focus toward women's inner landscapes and their right to observe and express, the work expands the artist’s feminist engagement beyond confrontation into psychological terrain. 

Recently, Elgready has turned toward textile-based media as a means of deepening her feminist inquiry and reconnecting with personal and cultural traditions. This shift was most clearly marked by her 2021 solo exhibition A Journey Through Time “الرحلة”, held at Gallery Misr in Cairo. The exhibition showcased a series of embroidered and mixed-media works that reflected a significant evolution in her practice. Drawing conceptual inspiration from Herbert G. Wells’ 1895 science fiction novel The Time Machine – which tells the story of a man who travels far into the future to witness the evolution and decline of human civilization – the artist used narrative threads, both literal and metaphorical, to explore the shifting relationship between human beings, place, and temporality.

In these works, Elgready navigated the space between figuration and abstraction. Some pieces borrow directly from lived reality, while others inhabit imagined or hybrid realms. Executed primarily in thread, the compositions are flattened and decentralized, composed of vivid reds, blues, and greys that transition fluidly across the surface. The stitching, at times intricate and layered, reflects a tactile engagement with memory and care. Visually, several works recall the biomorphic forms and playful surrealism found in the drawings of Spanish artist Joan Miró, evoking a sense of fluid consciousness and dream logic.

Beyond formal aesthetics, the exhibition foregrounded the labor of embroidery itself – a practice often associated with domestic femininity – as a powerful site of endurance, cultural continuity, and quiet resistance. Through this material language, Elgready wove together past and present, personal and political, while affirming the potential of textile art as both a historical and contemporary feminist tool.

Themes of myth and fiction became central to Elgready’s practice in the years following her textile shift. Between 2021 and 2023, she devoted herself to researching how myths – often assumed to be detached from reality – can originate from lived experience, evolving through oral transmission and the distortions of collective memory. This led to her 2023 solo exhibition Re-envision at Gallery Misr, which featured three large-scale installations alongside a series of embroidered and mixed-media works on canvas. “My research was about how most myths often have a reference and/or origin in reality, and are shaped in mythical form as a result of oral circulation or distorted human perception,” the artist explained.

Among the works exhibited, Untitled, 2023, part of the Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation (DAF) collection in Beirut, stands out as an expression of this conceptual framework. Composed as a densely embroidered textile map, the piece weaves together delicate floral motifs, loose patchwork, and symbolic patterns in thread. Across the surface, soft, fragmented forms contrast sharply with sweeping black winds that cut through the composition – an allegorical device the artist uses to signify the invasion of “false histories.” The work also draws on the Quranic tale of Prophet Suleiman, who was gifted dominion over the wind. Elgready reimagines this power as “black winds” الرياح السوداء – no longer divine, but corrupted by misinformation, violence, and the weight of modern history. Where Suleiman’s wind enabled miraculous movement, hers signifies erosion, rupture, and the distortion of collective memory. These dark flows reference the disorienting effects of misinformation, war, and political manipulation, specifically in relation to the artist’s lived context during ongoing conflicts in Gaza and Sudan.

Despite its visual delicacy, the work confronts harsh realities. The tactile intricacy of the embroidery reflects both vulnerability and resistance, positioning feminine craft as a means of political engagement. In its layered textures and symbolic content, Untitled reflects Elgready’s sustained interest in how fiction and truth coexist, fracture, and reassemble, mirroring the broader complexities of contemporary life.

Beyond her studio practice, Elgready has excelled at using art as a tool for social change. In 2000, she co-founded the Gudran Association for Art and Development, a community-based initiative aimed at empowering women and youth in vulnerable areas through creative participation and capacity-building. Through Gudran, she worked on several projects that reimagined the relationship between art and public space, including Wekalet Behna, El Max Fishermen’s Village Project, and Mediterranean Carpets.

The latter, realized in 2009 in collaboration with Love Difference and artist Michelangelo Pistoletto, brought together artisans from El Max village in Alexandria to produce a monumental textile work of collective authorship. Titled Mediterranean Carpets, the piece spans 7.5 x 3.5 m and is composed of ten interlinked segments. Designed by Elgready and executed by local craftspeople, the work embodies a collaborative vision of shared identity across the Mediterranean. It was exhibited during the International Festival of Sustainable Artistic Events in Murcia, Spain, and remains a defining example of socially engaged art rooted in place, dialogue, and cultural exchange. Elgready has also exhibited her work internationally, with presentations across Egypt, Italy, Germany, Spain, France, Sweden, New York, and Senegal, affirming the transnational resonance of her practice.

Aliaa Elgready’s multifaceted body of work reflects a deep engagement with material, memory, and meaning. Whether through installation, performance, or thread, she weaves personal experience with cultural narrative, merging formal experimentation with social critique. Her practice moves fluidly between the real and the imagined, the historical and the mythic – always grounded in a belief in art’s capacity to reflect, question, and transform. With an artistic voice shaped by lived experience, feminist inquiry, and collaborative ethos, Elgready continues to contribute meaningfully to the evolving landscape of contemporary Arab art.

Sources

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