Natural Scenes

Natural Scenes is a solo exhibition by the Egyptian artist Nermine El Ansari. It is on view from 11 October to 5 November 2026 at Villa Violette on Adly Street, Downtown Cairo. The festival also lists Mashrabia Gallery of Contemporary Art, in Downtown, as a location for the show. According to Al-Ahram, the show then continues at Mashrabia until 12 November. Curated by Stefania Angarano, it is part of D-CAF 2026, the Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival. El Ansari brings together an immersive sound installation, sculpture and drawing. The sculptures are fragments assembled from miniature red bricks, shown with terracotta pedestals. Entry is free.

Behind the show lies the question of what remains of nature, and how much of it living beings can keep, while machines and advanced technology drive the planet towards modernity. El Ansari takes up transmutation as something felt in a person's inner space, where the surroundings closest to hand never settle. The festival text compares her to "an apprentice architect", collecting broken pieces and building from them a setting in which time appears frozen.

In the sculptures, the miniature bricks become fragments of structures, rebuilt in the likeness of forms that once existed. The red brick has a history in her work. Her painting series Constructions (2007 to 2009) was made on wood and shown with sound. It referred to "ashway'iyat", informal housing built of red brick, and to red bricks thrown over a wall between its two sides. For Natural Scenes the terracotta pedestals were made with potters from Mahmoud Moussa Studio in Fustat, Old Cairo. Youssef Assaf handled sound design and editing, and Orient Productions is the co-producer. The show sits in the festival's New Media and Visual Arts programme.

Born in France in 1975 and based in Reykjavík, El Ansari works across installation, video, drawing, photography and performance, with a focus on what she calls "social geography". She trained at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Mashrabia gave her a solo show, Exercise, in 2007, and included her in Invisible Presence at the Mawali Museum, 2009 to 2010. Her installation No Longer was shown at Skaftfell Art Center in Seyðisfjörður, Iceland, in 2023.