Egypt Here and There: The Architectures and Images of National Exhibitions and Pavilions, 1926–1964

Abstract

In 1898 the first agricultural exhibition was held on the island of Gezira in a location accessed from Cairo’s burgeoning modern city center via the Qasr el-Nil Bridge. Between that year and 1926 there were 25 exhibitions held at the site, a key aspect of colonial displays of modern Egyptian economy. From 1926 the same site was transformed into a stage for presenting the country’s national economy. In each of the exhibitions held at the site new buildings, pavilions and showrooms were built to exhibit national production in agriculture and industry. The history of the site captures a pivotal process in Egypt’s modernization: the ways in which Egyptian strategies of self-representation developed over time. Concurrent with these exhibitions held in Cairo, Egypt participated in several international exhibitions where architecture and imagery were deployed to present the country’s modernity to the world. In Egypt and abroad the architectures of national exhibitions and pavilions, as well as their circulated images, were powerful tools for communicating Egypt’s modernity and progress to national and international audiences.In this paper, exhibitions held in Cairo in 1926, 1936, 1949 and 1958 are discussed in terms of their architectures and the construction of images that put into sharp relief the state’s positioning of the materiality of modernity in the Egyptian context. Egypt’s participation in the 1939 and 1964 New York World’s Fairs as well as the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair are also discussed. This paper maps and situates these exhibitions in relation to one another and examines several examples of Egyptian exhibition architecture between 1926 and 1964, a period framed by the rise and fall of state-led nationalist representations of Egypt.