Wael Shawky lands in Sydney

Sydney is screening a 45-minute Egyptian opera-film about a street fight in Alexandria that helped tip a country toward British occupation, and it is sitting inside the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia until June 29, 2026. The work is Wael Shawky’s Drama 1882, and the museum calls it a highlight of the 2024 Venice Biennale. (mca.com.au) Wael Shawky is an artist from Alexandria, born in 1971, and he made Drama 1882 for Egypt’s national pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia in 2024. The Venice presentation centered on Egypt’s Urabi Revolution, a nationalist revolt against imperial influence between 1879 and 1882. (labiennale.org, lissongallery.com) The story Shawky stages is not a broad textbook survey. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles says the film turns on a cafe brawl between a local donkey owner and a Maltese man, then follows how that clash fed events that led to more than 70 years of British colonial rule in Egypt. (moca.org) Instead of making a documentary, Shawky wrote an original musical play and then directed, choreographed, and composed it himself for the camera. The result is an eight-part opera performed by Egyptian actors and singers in classical Arabic. (lissongallery.com, whatson.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au) He filmed it in a historic theater in Alexandria, which gives the piece the feel of a stage work and a movie at the same time. That split matters because Shawky has spent years retelling history through performance, puppetry, film, painting, and sculpture rather than through straight archival narration. (moca.org, lissongallery.com) At Venice, the pavilion broke through the usual biennial noise. Lisson Gallery’s roundup of reviews quoted The Art Newspaper calling it one of the most inventive and unusual offerings of the 2024 Biennale, and other coverage reported lines stretching more than 200 meters outside the Egypt pavilion. (lissongallery.com, scenenow.com) The Sydney run is not the first stop after Venice. The work also traveled to the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2024 and is now listed by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles for a United States presentation after its Australian showing. (povmagazine.com, moca.org) At the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, the exhibition opened on March 5, 2026, in the Macgregor Gallery and runs through June 29, 2026. The museum’s 2026 program placed Shawky’s installation at the front of the year, before major shows by Australian artists later in the season. (mca.com.au, cityhub.com.au) So the Sydney arrival is less a one-off import than the next leg of a long museum life for a Venice commission. A pavilion work built around Egypt in 1882 is now being watched in Australia in 2026, with the same mix of empire, performance, and national storytelling that made it stand out in Venice in the first place. (mca.com.au, labiennale.org)