Manar Moursi

Manar Moursi

Egypt/Canada

photography · sound · video · artist books · performance · installation · writing

Artist in Residence from July to September 2025

Manar Moursi (b. 1983) is an Egyptian-Canadian artist, architect and scholar whose multidisciplinary practice spans photography, sound, video, performance, installation and artist books. Grounded in architectural thinking and informed by eco-critical, feminist and decolonial perspectives, her work asks how built environments choreograph bodies and ritual and how those spaces might be reclaimed.

Her recent works include Blue-Black Liver (mock newspaper, 2025) which re-cuts turn-of-the-century Jordan-River photographs to critique colonial hydropolitics; it launched with a stereoscopic, dual-voice performance in Berlin and Cairo. A Funeral at the Edge of Drought (11 min, 2025) layers women’s mourning songs with family photographs and slow tracking shots of Morocco’s desiccated Tighmert oasis, staging a metaphorical funeral for a collapsing landscape. Earlier, Sidewalk Salon: 1001 Street Chairs of Cairo (Onomatopee/Kotob Khan, Eindhoven/Cairo 2015) combined Polaroid images of Cairene street chairs with interviews with the chair owners, an essay and commissioned poetry and fiction. The book turns an everyday object into a lens on gender, labour and informal design in Cairo’s public space and has travelled as an exhibition and video programme to Eindhoven, Ghent, Sainte-Colombe-en-Auxois and Mexico City.

Manar is completing a PhD in History, Theory and Criticism of Art and Architecture at MIT. She has exhibited at Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin), Swimming Pool (Sofia) and SOMA (Mexico City); her projects have been supported by AFAC, Mophradat, the Canada Council for the Arts and others. In 2023 she received MIT’s Harold & Arlene Schnitzer Prize and was a Harvard Film Studies Center fellow. She has taught at the University of Toronto and the University of Waterloo and publishes both academic essays and creative texts.

From July to September 2025 at Rote Fabrik, Manar will investigate Zürich’s river-bathing pavilions as living infrastructures of pleasure and care. Using medium-format photography, ambient sound walks and archival imagery, she will explore how leisure, gender and ecology intersect at the water’s edge. The residency is conceived as open fieldwork; the collected material may later emerge as photographs, a soundscape or a riverside performance.

In parallel she will finish Storm Over Cairo (Edition Fink, Zurich,forthcoming 2025), an artist book developed from The Loudspeaker and the Tower. After a decade photographing informally built mosques along Cairo’s ring road and canals, Manar collages medium-format images with residents’ testimonies and a first-person essay on migration, grief and the city’s evolving soundscape; nested newspaper zines echo mosque loudspeakers as alternative broadcast systems, subverting state-controlled media formats.