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Contemporary Art and the Display of Ancient Egypt

16 January 2025

A new open access volume, Contemporary Art and the Display of Ancient Egypt, authored by Alice Stevenson (UCL Institute of Archaeology), is now available.

Contemporary Art and the Display of Ancient Egypt - red and white poster advertising new book with cover image

Contemporary Art and the Display of Ancient Egypt authored by Alice Stevenson was published today (16 January) by UCL Press.

Artistic interventions are now a popular means of delivering fresh perspectives on museum displays, including in galleries devoted to ancient Egypt. Installations are commonly said to put the past and present ‘into dialogue’ with each other, offering external critical voices on the work of decolonisation.

Contemporary Art and the Display of Ancient Egypt argues that the contemporary and the ancient do not necessarily inform each other. Instead they are mediated by, and mediations of, the museum that produces them. Rather than explore how contemporary artists have been inspired by Egypt, this book examines how they have shaped the language and discourse around study of the Egyptian past by looking at the wider field of public display in which both have been historically situated.

Building on this critical history of practice, the book draws from experiments in bringing contemporary artistic sculptures, conceptual pieces, multimedia films, sounds, smells and performances into galleries: at the British Museum in London, the Egyptian Museum in Turin and the State Museum of Egyptian Art in Munich. These are used to explore what contemporary art does in these spaces, the motivations for inviting artists in, and the legacies of those interventions. It ends with a reflection on how academics and curators can be involved in the creative process and how artists contribute to academic research.

Contemporary Art and the Display of Ancient Egypt bookcover (a painted image of Egyptian figures in the background and a wrapped white (marble?) sculpture in the foreground

The fully open access monograph, which is an output from Alice Stevenson's British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, may be downloaded from the UCL Press website or UCL Discovery. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800087576

Paperback £25.00 9781800087569
Hardback £45.00 9781800087552

Save 20% on print copies when you use the code UCL25LSM65L on the UCL Press website.

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