Chika Okeke-Agulu | Gazbia Sirry and Egyptian Modernists in Nasser’s Revolutionary Egypt
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This lecture comes out of a study of the mid-twentieth-century emergence of postcolonial strongmen in Africa, and artists’ response to this phenomenon. Chika Okeke-Agulu examines the work of Egyptian artist Gazbia Sirry (1925–2021) to show how, in the wake of the 1952 Free Officers Revolution, leading modernists were influenced by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s charisma and aligned their art with his brand of Egyptian nationalism and Pan-Arab ideology. Tracing formal and tonal shifts in Sirry’s art, Okeke-Agulu analyzes how she responded to Nasser’s increasingly repressive regime and the devastating outcome of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.
Chika Okeke-Agulu, an artist, critic and art historian, is Robert Schirmer Professor of Art and Archaeology and African American Studies, and Director of Africa World Initiative at Princeton University. He is editor of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art. His most recent books include El Anatsui: The Reinvention of Sculpture (2022); African Artists: From 1882 to Now (2021); Yusuf Grillo: Painting. Lagos. Life (2020). Okeke-Agulu was the Slade Professor of Fine Art, University of Oxford (2023), and is a Fellow of the British Academy.
