'2024 Overseas Exchange Exhibition: Wael Shawky' at Daegu Art Museum, Daegu, South Korea
23 August 2024
From 10 September 2024, The Daegu Art Museum will present the first solo exhibition at a public museum in South Korea by Wael Shawky as part of its 2024 International Exchange Exhibition. The exhibition will feature more than 70 works across film, painting, drawing, sculpture, music and installation, that explore the intersection of fiction and reality to present new historical perspectives. His work explores how stories are created and conveyed, suggesting that the 'facts' of history can never defined by a single perspective.
Shawky spent his childhood in Alexandria, Egypt, and Mecca, Saudi Arabia, and cites growing up observing the rapid transition from nomadic to modernised societies in the region as a source of artistic inspiration. Shawky describes this exhibition in Daegu as an exploration of “how the metaphysical world is connected to our lives.” This reflects the artist's ongoing interest in examining how non-material concepts – such as love, supernatural beings, and faith in gods—intertwine with modern life.
Shawky presents three video works in this exhibition: Al Araba Al Madfuna I (2012); I Am Hymns of the New Temples (2023); and a new work, titled Love Story (2024), which deal with mythologies from Egypt, the ancient Italian city of Pompeii, and South Korea, respectively. He was recently invited to exhibit at the Egyptian Pavilion of the 60th Venice Biennale and gained significant acclaim with Drama 1882, a video reinterpreting Egypt’s Urabi Revolution (1879-1882), which resisted Imperial rule. Although the three stories unfolding originate from different times and spaces, Shawky's artistic vision is vidily present throughout, proposing a dialogue between antiquity and modernity across diverse cultures.
Shawky has traveled to South Korea multiple times since 2022 to conduct research for Love Story, which reinterprets Korea’s oral folktales and traditional fairy tales through the three stories: Silkworm Princess, Gold Ax, Silver Ax, and The Rabbit’s Trial. The work offers a unique audiovisual experience of pansori storytelling, illudtrating a structure where the opposing worlds of the material and non-material coexist within a single narrative. A new stuite of drawings inspired by Love Story will also be showcased.
On view from 10 September 2024 – 23 February 2025
Find further information via Daegu Art Museum.
Shown here: Wael Shawky, Al Araba Al Madfuna I, 2012 (film still), Black & white film, sound, subtitles, Dimensions variable, 21:00 minutes © Wael Shawky, courtesy Lisson Gallery
