The atelier, comprised of its five devoted artisans who share familial bonds; Mohamed Abu Basil Metwalli, Basil Metwalli, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, Fatma Aboul Gheit and Rehab Aboul Gheit, returns having widened its gaze well beyond the sky. Nature in Tesserae is a journey through the flora and fauna of this land, from antiquity to the present day.
From Wednesday 28 October to Tuesday 17 November, Safarkhan is delighted to welcome back the Mosaics of Dahshur atelier for its second exhibition with us. Their debut in April 2025, King's Lake, introduced these villagers turned mosaicists and their faithful portraits of Egypt's native avifauna, and it remains one of the most cherished exhibitions in our recent history. A giraffe bows its head to drink. A hoopoe swoops in with a worm in its beak. Beneath a full moon, a night heron steps into still water. Every one of these scenes has been painstakingly cut by hand from marble, piece by tiny piece, in a village at the foot of the lesser-known Dahshur trio, the Black, Red, and Bent pyramids. A year and a half on, the atelier, comprised of its five devoted artisans who share familial bonds; Mohamed Abu Basil Metwalli, Basil Metwalli, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, Fatma Aboul Gheit and Rehab Aboul Gheit, returns having widened its gaze well beyond the sky. Nature in Tesserae is a journey through the flora and fauna of this land, from antiquity to the present day. The birds are still here. Hoopoes quarrel on an olive branch, bee-eaters chatter among the blossoms, and the northern bald ibis, the very bird that gave the ancient scribes their hieroglyph for the spirit, gather among the reeds. But now they share the stage with ibex resting in the desert shade, hares darting between doum palms, genets prowling a tree in search of a nest, and gazelle and oryx grazing beneath the acacia. Many of these creatures once roamed Egypt freely and survive today only on the rock faces of the Eastern Desert and the tomb walls of Saqqara, a few kilometres north of the atelier. Others still keep company with the villagers in the fields and canals of Dahshur. Taken together, they form a living archive of everything this land has nurtured, lost and held on to.
Tesserae are the small hand cut pieces from which every mosaic is built, and the Dahshur artisans shape them with the same rudimentary tools and materials as their forebears, following a method first established in Alexandria in the third century BC. Long before the Romans made mosaics their own, with visible gaps between each piece, the Egyptians of antiquity fitted their marble tightly together. The atelier's founder, American art historian Charlotte Sullivan, saw in this a quiet advantage: “The seeming defect of snugly fitted marble pieces was an immense plus. We were in an admittedly fortuitous fashion, attempting not just a revival of the art of marble mosaics but a revival of the distinctive method of making mosaics that was developed on home ground.” For almost five decades, Charlotte has spent the autumn to spring months in her beloved second home of Dahshur, and the artisans she trained remain faithful to her founding vision, “executing original designs that reflect both their cultural heritage and the rural setting in which they live.” That setting is changing, with the seasonal waters of the King's Lake (Birket el Malik), which once stretched from the farmlands across the desert sands to the base of the Bent, Black and Red Pyramids, last returned in 2015. Since then, as Sullivan observes, “with the disappearance of the lake, our area ceased to attract the quantity and variety of birds that had frequented the region over the course of centuries.” Seen in that light, this collection is more than a celebration. It is a quiet inventory of what Egypt stands to lose. Sullivan once remarked that “it was inevitable that I would come to see the theme of birds as a link between the remote past and the present.” With Nature in Tesserae, that link has grown to embrace the whole living world of the Nile valley. As with King's Lake, Safarkhan presents this exhibition entirely in support of the atelier and its artisans, an initiative that revives an ancient craft, sustains livelihoods, and makes a heartfelt case for protecting Egypt's natural heritage. In that, it speaks directly to our own ethos: a continual dialogue between the old and the new.
