Exhibition places modern art against Egypt’s pyramids, with some works forged from conflict

From doors salvaged in Cairo’s Garbage City to steel from Israeli shells in Lebanon, Forever is Now reimagines history and politics through repurposed materials

Against the monumental backdrop of the Pyramids of Giza in Egypt, Forever Is Now returns for its fifth edition this week, once again merging contemporary art with one of the world’s oldest surviving architectural landscapes.

Organised by Art D’Egypte in collaboration with the Egyptian government, the annual exhibition, which runs until December 6, has established itself as a singular event in the region: a platform where international artists are invited to create works that respond to the heritage of Ancient Egypt while dialoguing with the desert’s light, wind and stone.

This year’s exhibition, comprising 10 works by artists from all over the world, unfolds on the southern side of the plateau, where installations rise from the sand within sight of Khufu’s Great Pyramid.

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Crowds of tourists arriving to see the ancient wonders now find themselves greeted by interventions that reinterpret myth, memory and ecology through modern materials.

On Tuesday, the first day the exhibition was open to the public, the plateau was unusually crowded – a reflection of the uptick in tourism the Egyptian government has been celebrating since the opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum on November 1.

Visitors entered through the new Great Gate, a wide access point completed this April as part of a large‑scale renovation carried out by Orascom Pyramids Entertainment in partnership with the Supreme Council of Antiquities.

The redesign, which began in 2018 and was finalised this year, introduced waiting areas, signage and electric shuttle buses that ferry visitors from the gate up to the monuments – a move meant to reduce traffic and regulate vendor access.

The overhaul has formalised much of what was once a warren of informal carriage operators and souvenir stalls, shifting the atmosphere on the plateau towards smooth management and modern infrastructure.

Within this new landscape, Forever Is Now’s installations appear as a marker of a different kind of renewal – one that pairs Egypt’s pharaonic resonance with contemporary art.

Doors of Cairo by Alexandre Farto is displayed near the Giza pyramid complex. EPA

Among the first works visitors encounter is Doors of Cairo, Portuguese artist Alexandra “Vhils” Farto’s expansive arrangement of 65 repurposed doors, assembled into a labyrinth of weathered surfaces and colour.

Built on a metal scaffolding, the piece serves as the literal entrance to the exhibition route. The doors were collected from junkyards across Cairo, many sourced from Garbage City, the dense recycling hub where roughly 90 per cent of the capital’s waste is processed.

The gesture of transplanting these everyday artefacts to Giza was meant to connect Egypt’s modern urban realities to its ancient heart – “a place that is quintessentially Egyptian”, Farto tells The National.

The work juxtaposes domestic scale and ancient monumentality, reviving discarded materials in the shadow of stone built to last forever.

Nearby stands Echoes of the Infinite, created by Alex Proba in collaboration with SolidNature, the Amsterdam‑based natural stone company represented in Cairo by chief executive David Mahyari.

Formed from three aligned sculptures carved in different colourful polished stone, the work reads as a single monument from certain vantage points – a deliberate echo of the visual harmony of the three pyramids.

Triptych-style Echoes of the Infinite by Alex Proba aligns with the three pyramids. EPA

“The colourful with the colourless, the new with the old,” Mahyari tells The National, explaining that the magic of the piece was rooted in the artist’s intention to create an aesthetic “clash” between the work and the surrounding monuments that would make it stand out.

The brightly hued, polished stones clash with the plateau’s beige expanse, evoking playfulness and motion amid the still grandeur of Giza’s geometry.

With Null, Paris‑based Recycle Group – a Russian art collective – hammered at deeper philosophical questions.

The installation Null by Recycle Group alludes to the eternal continuity of the pyramids. EPA

A large white zero, its central void framing the pyramids beyond, is entwined with figures in classical robes - a nod to Egypt’s Greco‑Roman chapter. Standing before their work, the artists explain they were linking zero as a symbol of beginning and return with the Ouroboros, the ancient serpent devouring its tail.

Lebanese artist Nadim Karam brought one of the exhibition’s most politically charged pieces. His Desert Flowers depicts the three phases of the lotus blossom – bud, emergence and full bloom – a plant held sacred since pharaonic times.

Nadim Karam's Desert Flowers uses war-time materials to depict new blooms. EPA

The sculptures shimmer rust-brown against the sand. But the materials tell a harder story: mangled steel salvaged from Beirut and southern Lebanon, twisted remnants of recent Israeli shelling, and fragments dismantled from Karam’s earlier shows, including one in AlUla, Saudi Arabia.

“I wanted to play with something simple that would also be very expressive,” Karam says. “The materials are symbols of ruin and decay, but they are used to depict the blooming of a new flower.”

The work, which is one of the stronger contributions to this year’s round of the famed exhibition, merges devastation with regeneration - nature re‑emerging from the remains of conflict.

Another standout piece comes by Brazilian artist Ana Ferrari. Entitled Wind, it is a luminous installation of 21 towering flutes formed from polished aluminium.

Wind by Anna Ferrari is an installation driven by music and performance art. EPA

Their mirrored shafts catch the desert sun while channels cut into each tube allow the breeze to play them like instruments, with each flute playing a distinct pitch that Ferrari, who studied sound frequencies, designed.

Two assistants use hand-held mirrors to reflect light into the flutes, throwing rhythmic flashes across the sand and adding a subtle touch of performance art.

Ferrari’s artist statement describes the work as “a poetic meditation on the unseen forces that animate our world”, with each flute etched with the frequency wave of its corresponding note.

Arranged in a spiral - one of the oldest symbols of air movement - the sculpture becomes a living collaboration between nature and artist, audible only when wind moves through it.

Representing Egypt this year is Salha Al Masry with Ma’at, a rendition of the royal signet ring familiar from ancient tombs. Cast on a scale large enough for visitors to stand within its circular frame, the sculpture’s outer face bears passages relating to truth and justice from Book of the Dead, an ancient Egyptian funerary text written on papyrus.

With Ma'at, Egyptian artist Salha El Masry enlarges the signet ring to raise questions about the weight of authority. EPA

Inside, an engraving depicts the goddess Ma’at, who was believed to weigh the hearts of the dead against her feather before their passage to the afterlife. The light-hearted would be admitted, the heavy-hearted wouldn’t.

A signet ring has been found in the collection of almost every high-profile pharaoh whose remains have been unearthed in Egypt, Al Masry says.

“While it was intended to highlight this seemingly insignificant artefact, my piece is also a commentary on government and on how rulers have to bear the weight of administering justice.”

By magnifying the ring to heroic proportions, she turns an emblem of authority into a public space for reflection on fairness and moral responsibility.

As visitors weave through metal, stone and sound, buses continue to shuttle new crowds up from the Great Gate.

The ancient silhouettes of the pyramids frame an exhibition that, for all its international scope, centres on Egypt’s layered identity – where the eternal monuments of the past now share their desert foreground with pieces about impermanence, reuse and renewal.

Forever Is Now is running until December 6; entry to the exhibition is free of charge for visitors to the Giza Plateau upon paying the standard entrance fee for the Pyramids Complex