Youssef Nabil
Vogue Arabia

For Vogue Arabia, Youssef Nabil reflects on his landmark exhibition To Dream Again at Musée d'Orsay, where he becomes the first Arab artist invited to engage in dialogue with the museum’s collection. The article traces Nabil’s journey from a young artist arriving in Paris after being rejected from Egypt’s leading art and cinema academies to achieving international recognition through his hand-painted photographs exploring memory, identity, exile, and fantasy.

Centered around Nabil’s relationship to the Musée d’Orsay collection and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes’s Le Rêve, the exhibition reframes Orientalist imagery through the perspective of an Egyptian artist reclaiming narrative agency and cultural memory. The profile also highlights Nabil’s collaboration and friendship with Marina Abramović, while exploring the spiritual and autobiographical dimensions of his practice, in which dreams, longing, and transformation emerge as central themes throughout his work.

Excerpted words written by Caterina Lo Mascolo Minthe for Vogue Arabia