Observations, Here and There...

Safarkhan opens its new season with Observations, Here and There..., the debut solo exhibition of the Swedish painter Malin Juntikka, on view from 30 September to 20 October 2026 at the gallery's Zamalek home on Brazil Street. The gallery notes that this is one of its first exhibitions for a foreign artist in well over a decade, a telling choice for a house built on Egyptian Modernism.

Born in 1999 in Härnösand, Sweden, Juntikka studied theoretical philosophy at Lund University and has lived in Egypt since 2024. The gallery presents her as a social realist: her paintings take real people, places and events as their subject and put them under what Safarkhan calls a "philosophical-artistic examination" of social norms, ills and phenomena, told either as a story or as a critique.

The works on show move between two worlds that co-exist in the artist, the gallery writes: the "here and now" of Egypt and the "there and then" of Sweden. Each canvas comes with a short stream-of-consciousness text by the artist, offered as a companion to the image rather than a key to it. As her confidence has grown, the paintings have become larger and more ambitious, trying to place particular social conflicts within their longer histories.

The largest work illustrated so far, How 'Aida' Was Created (2026), is an oil on canvas measuring 200 by 250 centimetres. Built like a stage set, it opens a red theatre curtain onto tiers of seated spectators and a pyramid-lined perspective, framed by sailing ships, flags and nineteenth-century figures. Safarkhan points to a Scandinavian spirit in the painting, "pared-back, clear-cut, minimalist", with clearly defined segments and natural light.

The exhibition is a short window, three weeks, and a rare chance to see a young painter's first solo presentation at a gallery that dates its history to 1968. It also shows Safarkhan, better known for Mahmoud Said and his generation, testing what its long conversation between old and new can hold when the newcomer is an outsider looking closely at Egypt, and back at Sweden, from Zamalek.