Transforming the Egyptian Museum in Cairo: An Egyptian European Partnership

On Tuesday 27th January we will host a new lecture "Transforming the Egyptian Museum in Cairo: An Egyptian European Partnership" held by Heba Abd el Gawad, Corinna Rossi and Irene Morfini.

The project Transforming the Egyptian Museum in Cairo saw Museo Egizio leading a consortium of European museums including the Ägyptische Papyrussamlung of Berlin, the British Museum, the Louvre and the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden of Leiden to draw a compherensive masterplan to support the re-organisation of the iconic Tahrir museum.

The forthcoming opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum and of other regional museums in Egypt caused a re-distribution of the objects that affected the old display of the Egyptian Museum. This situation represented a chance to think of the future of this museum and to identify suitable directions of development in a coordinated way.

In order to test and apply the selected criteria, each museum participating in this project was assigned a gallery to be partly refurbished and Museo Egizio focussed the Old Kingdom section. Heba Abdelgawad, Irene Morfini and Corinna Rossi will present the work that is about to be completed, the challenges that this project had to face, the criteria that were identified to suggest the project of re-display, and the preliminary results of the conservation carried out on select objects.

Egyptian Egyptologist Heba Abd el Gawad is Museo Egizio in Turin curator/scientific coordinator for the Egyptian-European project funded by the EU Transforming the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

She has previously led various curatorial roles in the UK including co-curating Two Temple Place’s 2016 Beyond Beauty: Transforming the Body in Ancient Egypt exhibition, project curator of the British Museum’s Egypt and Sudan department: Asyut Project, and the Egyptian Museum in Cairo researcher for the British Museum’s Greece and Rome department: Naukratis project. More recently, she has guest curated Listen to her! Turning up the Volume on Egypt’s Ordinary Women exhibition at the Petrie Museum of Egyptian and Sudanese Archaeology.  She has been selected as one of the most influential 21 Egyptian women in 2021 for her community work in the heritage sector. 

Corinna Rossi is Associate Professor of Egyptology at Politecnico di Milano and Director of the Italian archaeological mission to Umm al-Dabadib (Kharga Oasis). She is a team member of the Italian-Dutch mission to Saqqara of Museo Egizio and Rijksmuseum van Oudheden and of the joint IFAO/Museo Egizio mission to Deir al-Medina. She is the director of the EU-funded project LIFE (Living In a Fringe Environment), centred on the archaeological site of Umm al-Dabadib, based at Politecnico di Milano and in partnership with Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II.

The Egyptologist and Archaeologist Irene Morfini is co-director of the Min Project in Luxor since 2013. Since 2011 she has been vice-president of the Canarian Association of Egyptology and since 2017 she is part of the staff of CAMNES (Center for Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies). Since 2019 she has been working in the field for the EU-funded project Transforming the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

The event will be held in English and it will be broadcast via streaming on the Museum's Facebook page and Youtube channel.