Technology, Time, and the State: The Aesthetics of Hydropower in Postcolonial Egypt

Abstract

This thesis analyzes the work of Hamed Owais, Tahia Halim, and Inji Efflatoun, three artists who were active in Egypt during its era of decolonization following the 1952 Revolution. Using the large-scale public works project of the Aswan High Dam as a lens, this study focuses on the ways in which the construction of the dam and the social, political, and technological changes that it caused were linked to the ways in which Egyptian artists envisioned and employed concepts of time in new ways in their work. Additionally, artists in Egypt, existing outside of the binary of American abstract expressionism and Soviet socialist realism, employed and synthesized new aesthetic ideas in order to achieve their social and political goals. Fundamentally, this thesis argues that the blurred lines of these aesthetics, like the Aswan High Dam itself, reflect the geopolitical tensions that pressurized Egypt in the global Cold War era as it sought independence from imperial influence, and that they capture the ways in which artists in Egypt incorporated particular understandings of temporality into their work during a time of modernization. A close consideration of the work of these artists provides a window into a nuanced understanding of the intersections between aesthetics, politics, and technology in postcolonial Egypt.