In light of its reflection on its role as a contemporary archaeological museum, the Museo Egizio, on the occasion of its bicentennial, has launched an artist residency program featuring artists Ali Cherri and Sara Sallam.

Ali Cherri (1976) is an artist and filmmaker born in Beirut and based in Paris. Winner of the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2022, Cherri works primarily with sculpture, graphics, and film, focusing on the temporal gap between ancient worlds and contemporary societies and the reinterpretation and construction of historical narratives around ancient objects. He explores the tension between the perspectives of museum professionals and visitors and the inability of objects and artifacts to return their gaze or tell their own stories.

Returning the Gaze (2024) is the title of the artistic project conceived for the Museo Egizio, developed through multiple discussions with the Museum’s director and curator Paolo Del Vesco. The artistic reflection underpinning this project addresses themes such as the history of the collection, the role of an archaeological museum in contemporary society, the biographies and evolving meanings of museum objects, how the public perceives them, and, above all, the narratives constructed around them. Cherri’s installation, created during his artist residency, is located in the grand vestibule in front of the entrance to the Gallery of Kings. Inspired by several sculptures from the collection and emblematic artifacts of ancient Egyptian material culture, the project is supported by PAC2024 - Piano per l’Arte Contemporanea, promoted by the Direzione Generale Creatività Contemporanea del Ministero della Cultura.

The artist selected seven artifacts from the collection, ranging from sarcophagi to statues, which for various reasons are entirely or partially missing their eyes or gaze. The missing elements were reconstructed by digitally scanning the artifacts and reshaping them according to the artist’s vision, then casting them in polished bronze to reintegrate the gazes of the original ancient objects. The creation of this work fostered new synergies with local institutions, particularly the De Carli Artistic Foundry in Volvera (Turin). Ali Cherri’s relationship with the Museo Egizio began in 2018 during the group exhibition "Anche le statue muoiono. Conflitto e patrimonio tra antico e contemporaneo", held in Turin at the Museo Egizio, the Musei Reali, and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. This exhibition explored the destruction of cultural heritage through a dialogue between ancient artifacts and contemporary works.

Sara Sallam (1991) was born in Egypt and now lives in the Netherlands. She is an emerging multidisciplinary artist whose work spans photography, writing, and video installations. A central theme of her art is offering a counter-narrative to dominant Western perspectives, recentering marginalized voices and decolonizing Egyptian archaeological heritage.

Her installation, The Sun Weeps for the Land and Calls from the Garden of Stones (2024), located at the end of the Gallery of Kings, consists of three pieces that reinterpret the diaspora of Sekhmet statues. These statues, originally sculpted for the mortuary temple of Amenhotep III, have been dispersed across various European museums since the 19th century. According to Sallam, the installation reminds us that these sacred statues, which once protected the pharaoh, now lie anguished in museums, unable to fulfill their spiritual purpose. In a two-meter-long photographic collage titled Shifting Sands, Carving Scars (2024), Sallam depicts the act by which Vitaliano Donati in the 18th century and Jean Jacques Rifaud in the 19th century almost wounded the land to extract the 21 Sekhmet statues from the mountains of Thebes. These statues are now housed in the Gallery of Kings at the Museo Egizio. The artwork reworks various archival visual documents, including the famous 1819 engraving depicting Bernardino Drovetti and his agents in Egypt, as well as photographs from the Brooklyn Museum and the Museo Egizio.

In Prayer Beads (2024), Sallam pays homage to the 730 Sekhmet statues that recited a year-long litany in the mortuary temple to protect the pharaoh. The 709 cyanotype prints on display represent the statues now dispersed across temples and museums, while 21 empty spaces signify those held by the Museo Egizio. These missing prints were symbolically returned to Egypt through a ritual documented in the two-channel video work A Broken Circle of Sisters (2024). In this synchronized video, viewers can observe the artist performing a series of rituals with the 21 cyanotype prints representing the Sekhmet statues of the Museo Egizio. Sara Sallam’s work was made possible with the support of the Mondriaan Fund, a Dutch public organization dedicated to visual arts and cultural heritage.

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