Sara Sallam Suturing Wounds, 24
In Suturing Wounds, multi-disciplinary artist Sara Sallam stitches together photographs of ancient Egyptian textiles printed onto fabric.
Sallam’s facsimiles of fragments of funerary garments call attention to the historic practice of excavating and looting Egyptian burial sites to satisfy the demands of European collectors.
Sallam’s work features fabric torn from cemeteries in Upper Egypt; evident in their delicate, fraying edges and the faint traces of black resin from mummification. In the late nineteenth century, tombs dating from the 26th to the 30th Egyptian Dynasties (c. 664-343 BCE) were heavily excavated. Local and foreign archaeologists, collectors and dealers sold and gifted their finds to European museums. Sallam’s photographs accentuate the textiles’ intricate motifs and patterns, believed to hold protective powers that ward off evil and safeguard the wearer in life and death.
In assembling facsimiles of these fragments into a single garment, Sallam seeks to ‘counteract the violence inflicted upon these textiles and the bodies stripped of the woven fabrics meant to protect them’. In her self-portraits, the artist wears the tunic she has created, ‘in honour of my unknown ancestors whose bodies were violated’.
Suturing Wounds was produced in 2024 during a Jameel Fellowship at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
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Sara Sallam (b. 1991) is a multidisciplinary artist-researcher who grew up in Egypt and now lives in the Netherlands. Working across photography, moving images, narrative writing, archival interventions, and self-publishing handmade books, she retells contested histories through counter-narratives that reclaim and decolonise ancient Egyptian heritage. Her practice, distinguished by poetic interventions into archives and a dedication to imagining empathetic engagement with Egypt’s past, reflects on themes of absence, loss, longing, and the colonial framing of Egyptian culture.
Her work has been exhibited internationally, most recently at the Museo Egizio in Turin, the Art & History Museum in Brussels, the Medelhavsmuseet in Stockholm, and the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leiden, and supported by institutions including Mondriaan Fund, Magnum Foundation, Prince Claus Fund, and the Arab Fund for Arts & Culture.
Sara Sallam
Suturing Wounds
Pitt Rivers Museum
Upper Gallery,
South Parks Rd,
Oxford
OX1 3PP
25 October–25 January
Monday 12pm–5pm
Tuesday–Sunday 10am–5pm
