Yasmine El Meleegy
Yasmine El Meleegy (b. 1991, Cairo) is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Cairo. She received her BFA in Painting from Helwan University (2013), a Diploma in Multimedia from the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Nîmes (2014), and was part of the MASS Alexandria Independent Art Program (2016). Her work has been featured in solo and group shows across Cairo, Marseille, New York, Thorsminde, Basel, Berlin, Yinchuan, Gwangju, Villorba, Venice, Milan, Jyvaskyla, Cape Town, Sang, and Kolkata. Solo exhibitions include Red Gold, Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh (2025); The Six Hundred Seventy Four Forms And A Dragon, FOR Space, Basel, Switzerland (2023); To Mend Is to Shatter, Gypsum Gallery, Cairo, Egypt (2023); Scaffolding a Familiar Epoch, Performative intervention at Stephenson pharmacy, Cairo, Egypt (2021); and Rites of Passage at Townhouse Factory, Cairo, Egypt (2018). She has received grants from AFAC Visual Arts Grant, Mophradat Artist Grant, Culture Resource Al-Mawred Al-Thaqafy Grant (2021), Lieux Publics (2022), and Pro Helvetia (2018), and has participated in residencies at Art Omi: Artists, New York; Atelier Mondial, Basel; the Egyptian Academy in Rome; and CAOS Museum, Italy. Her work is in the collection of MOCA Yinchuan, China, and she has been nominated for the Future Generation Art Prize (2024) and the Follow Fluxus – After Fluxus grant in Wiesbaden, Germany.
Yasmine El Meleegy is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans sculpture, installation, and site-specific interventions. Working as a sculptor, designer, museologist, restorer, and archaeologist, she explores personal and collective memory through replication, traditional craft, and industrial production. Her work often engages with repair and reconstruction as both material and symbolic acts. In Rites of Passage, she transformed replicas of her late mother’s belongings into fragile sculptural relics, using repetitive processes of casting and recasting as a way of negotiating grief. At the same time, El Meleegy employs destruction and reassembly to revisit historical narratives, notably through works that repurpose fragments of porcelain from the factory of Egyptian sculptor and industrialist Fathy Mahmoud. By combining personal memories with broader national histories, she questions how collective memory is constructed and preserved.
Extending her interest in material histories, projects such as Future Farms examine themes of industrialization, agriculture, and mass production, while site-specific interventions like Scaffolding a Familiar Epoch reactivate historical spaces through restoration, craft, and storytelling. Across her practice, El Meleegy investigates how memory, materiality, and history are continuously reshaped through acts of making and remaking.
