Safarkhan Art Gallery Honours Egyptian Artist-Activist Inji Efflatoun

Safarkhan Art Gallery opened an exhibition to celebrate one of Egypt’s most influential artists, Inji Efflatoun. Titled ‘Remembering Inji: Centennial Collection’, the exhibition opened on the late artist’s 100th birthday on April 16th, and will run until May 21st.

Inji Efflatoun was an Egyptian painter and activist in the women’s movement in the late 1940s and 1950s. Efflatoun’s legacy is both artistic and political. She is known as an influential figure in the progressive and nationalist feminist movement, as well as a pioneer of modern Egyptian art. Despite being born into the Egyptian aristocracy, she was inspired by the social reality of the Egyptian working class, and produced a number of existentialist, psychologically charged works throughout her years as a surrealist artist. Inji’s work and legacy as a feminist artist are part of the modern history of Egypt, and have widely circulated in the Arab world.

Safarkhan, as the exclusive purveyor of her remaining works, will mark the 100th anniversary of Efflatoun’s birth with a one-of-a-kind biographical exposition of the artist’s life and works. It draws upon various sources to establish a comprehensive overview of the artist’s life, including personal possessions, curious artefacts she collected over the years, unseen photographic records from the height of her artistic career in Egypt and abroad, video segments from a recent biopic on the artist, previously unexhibited seminal oil works from her private collections, and the most impressive examples of her remaining portfolio.

Since Efflatoun’s passing, Safarkhan has been the exclusive custodian and one of the principle promoters and disseminators of her remaining body of work. The gallery has hosted six posthumous exhibitions for the artist, the most recent being ‘Memoirs of Inji’ in 2019.