Yasmine El Meleegy (b. 1991, Cairo) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans sculpture, installation, and site-specific intervention. Working across the roles of artist, restorer, and museologist, she engages with personal and collective memory through processes of replication, fragmentation, and repair. Her work positions material as a vessel for both history and speculation, revealing the fragility of inherited narratives.
Moving fluidly between studio production and site-specific intervention, she draws on craft traditions, industrial and national histories of Egypt, and personal narratives to examine how objects carry, distort, and transmit memory. Her process often includes labour-intensive craftwork of breaking and remaking objects. Whether working with domestic artefacts, architectural spaces, or remnants of mass production, she approaches materials as both traces and tools for creating new forms.
Moving fluidly between studio production and site-specific intervention, she draws on craft traditions, industrial and national histories of Egypt, and personal narratives to examine how objects carry, distort, and transmit memory.
Repetition, Material, and Labour
El Meleegy frequently begins with the object, domestic, industrial, or archival, using it as an entry point into broader socio-historical narratives. In Rites of Passage (2018), presented at Townhouse Factory, Cairo, she reworked personal belongings from her family home into repeated sculptural forms. Cast in wax and cement, these objects oscillate between fragility and permanence, negotiating the space between private mourning and public display.
This engagement with fragmentation continues in her use of porcelain remnants, often referencing Egyptian modernist industrial histories through the legacy of sculptor Fathy Mahmoud. Shattered fragments are reconstructed into mosaic-like compositions that intertwine personal memory with state narratives of modernisation and industrialisation, situating her sculptures between destruction and repair, as exemplified in the Magic Lamp from 2024.
El Meleegy’s installations extend these concerns into spatial and conceptual territories. Works such as To Mend Is to Shatter (2023, Gypsum Gallery) and The Six Hundred Seventy Four Forms And A Dragon (2023, FOR Space, Basel) employ repetition and accumulation to explore the labour of making and the traces of time embedded in materials. In Red Gold (2025, The Mattress Factory Museum, Pittsburgh), she turns to agricultural processes, constructing salt-based forms to reflect on production, global trade, and environmental precarity. Material here functions as both subject and medium, embodying the entanglement of labour, ecology, and economics.
Combining restoration with fabrication, El Meleegy reconstructed lost objects while introducing newly fabricated elements drawn from oral histories, blurring fact and fiction.
Her site-specific practice further interrogates histories and institutional authority. Scaffolding a Familiar Epoch (2021) transformed Stephenson Pharmacy in downtown Cairo into a hybrid space of care, memory, and archive. Combining restoration with fabrication, El Meleegy reconstructed lost objects while introducing newly fabricated elements drawn from oral histories, blurring fact and fiction. The project foregrounds the instability of archives and the performativity inherent in the act of preservation, raising questions about how cultural memory is maintained and mediated.
Across her diverse body of work, El Meleegy resists the notion of restoration as a return to an original state. Instead, she positions repair as a generative, ongoing process, acknowledging rupture while allowing for transformation. Whether through sculpture, installation, or site-specific intervention, her practice reflects a sustained inquiry into how histories are constructed, preserved, and reimagined, inviting viewers to inhabit the spaces between fragmentation and renewal.
Yasmine El Meleegy received her BFA in Painting from Helwan University (2013), a Diploma in Multimedia from the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Nîmes (2014), and was part of the MASS Alexandria Independent Art Program (2016). Alongside her solo exhibitions, she has participated in an extensive range of international group exhibitions. Her work has also been shown across institutions and project spaces spanning Cairo, Basel, Madrid, Paris, and beyond. Her practice has been supported by numerous grants and awards. She was recently shortlisted for the 7th Future Generation Art Prize (2023–24), further situating her within an international context of emerging contemporary practices. Her work is held in collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum in the UK and the Museum of Contemporary Art Yinchuan in China.
