‘All Eyes on Her!’: Reclaiming Egyptian Womanhood in This London Show

In ‘Orientalism’, Edward Said claims that, “From the beginning of Western speculation about the Orient, the one thing the Orient could not do was to represent itself.” Said’s words continue to ring true today, where a Western person’s imagination of an Egyptian immediately conjures up a pharaoh, or perhaps a vague sense of chaos. The image of an Egyptian woman, more specifically, is either that of exotic eroticism or heartbreaking oppression. The stolen Egyptian artefacts on display in their museums only reinforce these ideals; pharaonic statues and belly dancers’ attire and yashmaks.

These images are as far as can be from the life of the Egyptian woman.

Heba Abd el Gawad, a senior curator of Anthropology at the Horniman Museum and Gardens and Research Fellow at the Institute of Archaeology, University College of London (UCL), is intent on shifting that narrative. For the past four years, Abd el Gawad has been working on creating a space where the Egyptian woman can come as she is, with all that she is. The result is an exhibition at Horniman Museum and Gardens with a singular demand: ‘All Eyes on Her!’

‘All Eyes on Her!’ is dedicated to resisting the stereotypical orientalist image of Egyptian women by honouring what they refer to as the everyday activism of these women. To put it together, Abd el Gawad used the Egyptian artefacts already existing in the museum (statues, clothes, etc.) as well as new acquisitions from women in Egypt. “We wanted to show people the living Egypt,” Abd el Gawad tells CairoScene. “The spirit, stories, street signs, soundscapes and even WhatsApp stickers that make up Egypt today - instead of the ancient frozen culture it is often portrayed as. It’s not just an empty landscape with the pyramids as the backdrop.”

The exhibition is split into three sections: resist, revolt and reclaim. All three sections are fed with initiatives from Egyptian women performing these respective actions, often unknowingly. In the resistance section, there’s a display of eight women consistently showing up for their population, including Gehad Hamdy, the founder of feminist initiative Speak Up, and Namees Amrous, the founder of woman-centred community E7kky. The resist section also features the personal journal of Mai Zayed, the writer and director of ‘Ash Ya Captain’, a movie chronicling the trials and tribulations of Olympic female powerlifters.

‘All Eyes on Her!’ is Horniman’s first-ever bilingual exhibition. Some installations in the exhibition are even only in Arabic, with no English translation. “For the first time in my life, I stood in front of an exhibition window and could see myself,” says Abd el Gawad.

Everything in ‘All Eyes on Her!’ centres Egyptian women - including the visual identity and wallpaper, which were the responsibility of Egyptian illustrator Dina Zaitoun, commonly known as Artopathic. “We used the wallpaper as an opportunity to integrate elements that could widen people’s understanding of the Egyptian woman,” Zaitoun tells us. “In lieu of traditional feminism, with its rallies and petitions, we wanted to portray the normal woman, the woman on the street selling vegetables, or the woman taking her kids to school.”

Zaitoun’s illustrations gave the exhibition life; she set the stage for every element of the exhibition. She illustrated individual frames for each of the eight influential women in the resist section, based on their work and their character. She illustrated a wall of eyes (all on her, of course) that tell the story of Egyptian heritage, including the eye of Horus, as well as the evil eye, and the tearing eye Egyptian women often wear around their necks. She also illustrated iconic Egyptian women, close-up.

“Someone we featured a lot is Abla Kamel, who is featured at the centre of the display, standing on a balcony,” says Abd el Gawad. “She’s a representation of the average Egyptian woman, in all her vulnerability and equally all her strength.”

In the revolt section, Abd el Gawad and Zaitoun spotlighted an Egyptian woman the Western audience typically forgets about: the women of the 1919 revolution. Here, Zaitoun illustrated images of the revolting women of that time, clad in all black, on roller skates, with phrases from the revolution floating above. “When faced with images of faceless Arab women, the West regards them as oppressed. But we’re way more than that image. We’re not victims, we’re revolutionary,” Abd el Gawad says. The revolt section also features images of photographer and graffiti artist Hanaa El Degham’s work, whose graffiti took centre stage in representing women in the 2011 revolution.

In ‘Orientalism’, Edward Said continues to say that “Our role is to widen the field of discussion, not to set limits in accord with the prevailing authority.” This is the very responsibility that ‘All Eyes on Her!’ undertakes in the reclaim section of the exhibition.

The reclaim section is where the Egyptian artefacts that are already part of the museum’s collection reside, with phrases like “take me back to my country” illustrated above them in Arabic. Another installation features a glittering dress from the 19th century, one typically worn by belly dancers at the time. Instead of catering to the orientalist view of belly dancers as erotic, the dress is shown alongside a profile of Asmaa Halim, a dance movement therapist reclaiming belly dancing as the intergenerational method of empowerment it originated as.

“It’s still a priority to return these historical artefacts to their home,” Abd el Gawad emphasises, “but that doesn’t undo the damage done. Creating a conversation around our culture, showing people a new, perhaps shocking perspective on it, is what enables us to reclaim our heritage and our narrative as our own. We’re no longer being narrated by foreigners - we’re speaking for ourselves.”