About

Bio

Pansee Abou ElAtta is an Egyptian-Canadian scholar, visual artist, curator currently based in the Netherlands. Through both research and art practice, her work examines receptions of Ancient Egypt from the eighteenth century through the present, using Critical Museology and decolonial methodologies to envision liberatory possibilities for archives and collections.

She is an artist-research fellow in the NWA-funded Pressing Matter research project, investigating the potentialities of ‘colonial objects’ to support societal reconciliation with the colonial past. As part of this project, her large-scale interactive art installation is exhibited as part of a group exhibition at the Wereldmuseum Amsterdam titled Unfinished Pasts: return, keep, or…?

She is a former research fellow as part of Inherit, a BMBF-funded Käte Hamburger Kolleg based at the Humboldt University of Berlin, examining historical, contemporary and future transformations in heritage. Through this fellowship, her research investigated the way the concept of Ḥurma (Arabic: autonomy, dignity, privacy, honour) may be implemented to more ethically re-consider the collection, exhibition, and study of Ancient Egyptian mummified human remains.

Currently, she is (remotely) completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Carleton University, Canada, as part of Mobile Subjects, Contrapuntal Modernisms, in which she is producing artistic data visualizations representing the circulation of artists from the decolonizing world through the colonial and artistic capitals of London and Paris in the mid-century era.

Furthermore, she is a current visiting fellow at the Netherlands Institute for the Near East at Leiden University, undertaking a project titled “What can Ancient Egyptian mummies tell us about Dutch collection histories?” examining museological receptions and taxonomies of human remains in museum collections.

Contact at: pansee [dot] atta [@] gmail.com

Artist Statement 

My practice centers around using new media to decolonize cultural institutions and historical archives, disrupting the processes of collection, representation, and study through which geopolitical violence is legitimized. I am particularly interested in the processes of collection, exhibition, and representation related to Egypt, my place of national origin.

Mixing traditional media with high-tech, open-source, digital spaces, I use my practice as a means of visualizing liberatory futures in/and/through more expansive understandings of the past.