Alexandria as Phoenix: Moataz Nasr and the Biennale of Renewal

After twelve years of silence, the Alexandria Biennale returns under the artistic direction of Moataz Nasr. With This Too Shall Pass, the Egyptian artist and curator envisions not a mere revival, but a radical reimagining: the city itself becomes the stage, the artwork, the witness. Between heritage and resilience, the Biennale aspires to turn Alexandria into a living palimpsest—an open pact with its people and with the Mediterranean.

INTERNATIONAL FAIRS & EXIHIBITIONS

Charlotte Madeleine CASTELLI

8/29/20253 min read

When a biennale resurfaces after twelve years of silence, it does not simply return to the calendar: it redefines a lexicon. With This Too Shall Pass, Moataz Nasr steps into the role of curator for the Alexandria Biennale, turning inertia into method, hiatus into a critical device. Entrusted by his country with the delicate task of relaunching one of the world’s oldest art biennials, Nasr embodies artist, citizen, and curator in one. His trajectory—self-taught, versatile, suspended between institutional frameworks and grassroots cultural activism—already foreshadows the dual rhythm he intends to bring to Alexandria.

The chosen title, This Too Shall Pass, functions both as curatorial manifesto and ethical stance. Not an invitation to resignation, but a grammar of transit: the passage of time as force that strips away and reopens. Applied to Alexandria, a city that has survived and risen from earthquakes, floods, and bombs, it becomes a program: to step beyond the self-referentiality of the museum and rewrite the relationship between art and place. The Biennale will not “occupy” spaces; it will re-narrate them. Streets, historic buildings, gardens will serve not as containers but as apparatuses of meaning. In Nasr’s words, the city will itself become a harmonious artwork, reclaiming youth and brilliance.

This is less about the spectacle of the site-specific than about continuity between artistic gesture and social fabric. The Biennale aims to map latent energies, to operate as a form of civic montage. Here, Nasr’s metaphor of the “Socratic gadfly” finds resonance: art as a disturbance, an irritant that unsettles complacency and compels reflection.

The Mediterranean, by origin, is the Biennale’s first horizon. Conceived in 1955 to strengthen cultural ties among Mediterranean nations, it will not be a closed circuit. Nasr speaks of a wide umbrella: a curatorial frame porous enough to include voices beyond its geographic boundaries, yet grounded in the Mediterranean condition—precariousness, exchange, stratification, conflict, migration. Inclusion of marginal voices is not an add-on, but the very condition of possibility.

In Nasr’s practice, politics never dissolves into rhetoric. One recalls The Mountain, his 2017 Venice Biennale piece, where questions of power, fear, and female agency unfolded with poetic sharpness. It was not about “giving voice” but about relocating the point of listening. Alexandria will extend this logic: art not as consolation, but as a training ground for inhabiting contradictions without outsourcing them to the news cycle.

Italy runs as a persistent constellation through Nasr’s biography: from his debut at the 2003 Venice Biennale, to the sustained partnership with Galleria Continua. Today, the Italian connection resurfaces not merely as homage but as strategic bridge. As Rome prepares its Treasures of the Pharaohs exhibition, Alexandria positions itself as a laboratory for negotiating heritage and contemporaneity. The dialogue, if carried with precision, avoids folkloric branding and instead activates heritage as a living metabolism.

The real protagonist, however, remains the city. Curatorship must therefore become choreography: multiple rhythms, publics, and languages, maintaining complexity while remaining hospitable. The temptation of every biennale—to collapse into a festival of images—can only be resisted by cultivating contextual care: mediation, education, commissions attentive to place. Nasr has already assembled a diverse committee precisely to keep vision and operation aligned.

“For the people and among the people”: the phrase is both aspiration and test. Participation, here, is not audience activation but co-authorship of meaning. To inhabit a palace, a street, or a public square is not decorative spectacle; it reshapes perception, accepts unpredictability, insists on the friction of real life unfolding around the artwork.

If one were to search for a symbolic seal, I Am Free might serve: freedom not as slogan, but as process—a practice that expands when it meets other bodies, other knowledges, other desires. It mirrors the spirit of a Biennale that does not promise salvation through art, but its steady labor within the field of the real.

“This too shall pass”—yes. Yet what matters is how it passes: what forms it leaves, what networks it ignites, what imaginaries it renders thinkable. The Alexandria Biennale that Nasr imagines is not a revival, but a new origin. Not a format to replicate, but a pact with the city. Before artists and works, there is a gesture: to tear the surface, to let the light filter through where algae had long covered the water. That, already, is curatorship. That, already, is a message. Above all, it is an invitation to be present.