In the works of Wael Shawky, history never appears as a stable set of facts. Archives, myths, testimonies and documents are constantly traversed by doubt, omissions and alternative possibilities. Drama 1882, presented at the Grand Palais as part of Saison Méditerranée 2026, continues this investigation through a large-scale filmic work that revisits one of the most traumatic moments in modern Egyptian history. The project takes shape around the revolt led by Colonel Ahmed Urabi against British imperial domination between 1879 and 1882. A central figure in Egyptian nationalism, Urabi attempted to build a popular movement based on the idea of “Egypt for the Egyptians.” The uprising ultimately ended with the British bombardment of Alexandria and the exile of the nationalist leader. Shawky uses this episode not to produce a straightforward historical reconstruction, but to interrogate the ambiguities and shadow zones that run through official narratives. The narrative core of the work revolves around the events of the Summer of 1882, when a fight in a café between an Egyptian donkey handler and a Maltese citizen escalated into violent urban riots that left around three hundred people dead. Shawky challenges the dominant interpretation of the episode, questioning whether the riots were truly spontaneous or whether they instead served as a constructed pretext to justify subsequent British military intervention. Filmed inside a historic theatre in Alexandria, Drama 1882 combines cinema, opera and performance within painterly and artificial sets created by the artist. Period costumes, choreography, professional actors and non-professional performers are orchestrated within an environment suspended between theatrical fiction and historical reconstruction. Shawky wrote, composed, directed and choreographed the entire work, confirming the multidisciplinary nature of his practice. For more than three decades, the Egyptian artist has explored the relationship between historical narrative and the construction of collective memory. His works, spanning film, installation, performance, sculpture and drawing, frequently question the Western perspective through which the history of the Middle East has been narrated and codified. Rather than replacing one dominant narrative with another, Shawky creates spaces of ambiguity where truth and fiction remain continuously intertwined. Originally presented in the Egyptian Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale, Drama 1882 now arrives in Paris as one of the most ambitious productions Shawky has created in recent years. More than a historical film work, the project constructs a visual and musical dispositif in which the past continues to be renegotiated through imagination, theatre and political memory.
