Ahmed Shawky Hassan

Ahmed Shawky Hassan (b. 1989, Ismailia, Egypt) is an artist and writer whose practice explores the impact of historical and contemporary narratives on shaping dominant perceptions in the arts. His work investigates how these narratives spread, questioning the authority that contributes to their establishment. He employs diverse mediums, including texts, sculptures, videos, photographs, drawings, installations, and books.

 In 2024, he received the Egyptian Ministry of Culture’s State Encouragement Award for his book Video Museum (2020). His novel The Collapse of the Contemporary Art Factory (2022) was supported by the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC) and published by Al-Mahrousa Publishing. He has also won several international awards, including a research trip to Switzerland (Pro Helvetia, 2018) and an artist residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris (French Institute, 2017).

 Ahmed Shawky Hassan has held several solo exhibitions that highlight his research and artistic projects, including Exhibition at the Ard Foundation for the Arts in Cairo in 2023, Inauguration at the Sharjah Art Gallery at the American University in Cairo in 2019, and An Object Resembling an Artwork at Townhouse Gallery in Cairo in 2017.

A solo Exhibition “+99 Free Art Objects”

Group Exhibition “ Gallery in the store”

+99 Free Art Objects’ Statement:

In this exhibition, Ahmed Shawky Hassan explores the transformations that have affected visual memory between the era of the nation-state and that of the digital knowledge society, by reflecting on the relationship between memory and power in the transfer of knowledge from national encyclopedias to transnational digital archives.

Through collages sourced from the Encyclopedias of World Art supervised by Tharwat Okasha, Egypt’s Minister of Culture in the 1960s, and 3D-printed sculptures derived from open online archives, the narratives of national enlightenment intersect with the algorithmic logic of the market where the artwork is replaced by the model, memory by data, and beauty by consumption.

The project juxtaposes two temporalities: one that dreamt of defining the “universal” through culture, and another that reproduces the world as tradable data.

+99 Free Art Objects stands at this ambiguous threshold between free knowledge and cognitive capitalism, exploring a present in which collective visual imagination is reshaped according to the logic of replication and recycling.