b. Cairo, Egypt 1985
Email : maialshazly@gmail.com

Mai Al Shazly is a Cairo-based artist and researcher whose  multidisciplinary practice—encompassing photography, film, writing, and archival  work. She focuses on identity and its relationship with the surrounding environment, colonial legacy, power and the current political issues.

Al Shazly has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the University of Johannesburg Art Gallery (2022-2023), where she was an Artist-in-Residence in (2022). She also had an Artist-in-Residence at Philomena+ (2023) and showed her work there. Additionally, she participated in the Paris Biennale des Photographes du Monde Arabe Contemporain (2019). She was nominated for an artist residency in Switzerland, where she presented her work at VerzascaFoto Festival (2018). She also took part in a collective project at the Biennale Africaine de la Photographie in Bamako (2017). 

In her current practice-based research project The Broken Trade Winds, Al Shazly explores the notion of colonial debris, tracing its lingering presence in domestic rituals, aesthetics, and everyday objects—particularly around the dinner table. Working primarily with porcelain, she interrogates the constructed ideologies of whiteness and empire, and their entangled relationship with the African diaspora. Through this material, historically associated with purity, luxury, and colonial desire, Al Shazly examines how imperial modes of thinking are quietly reproduced through the familiar—inviting a closer look at how ideology survives in form, gesture, and design. Her work not only reimagines and manipulates archival material but also provokes a re-examination of what is remembered, forgotten, and deliberately erased. These artistic interventions encourage a critical engagement with the past and ask how history continues to shape the present.

This body of work marks a significant evolution in Al Shazly’s artistic inquiry. Her earlier projects—including UNDERCURRENTS, CAIRO BATS, and THE OTHER SIDE OF THEGIANT SLAB—focused on the politics of urban space, the restriction of movement, and the psychological impact of segregation and marginality. In these works, she investigated the multi-layered dynamics of survival, identity, and agency in relation to imposed boundaries and socio-political conditions.

The shift toward examining domestic spaces and colonial residues emerges as a natural progression in this trajectory—moving from the external pressures of cityscapes and public policy into the intimate sphere of the home. What remains constant is her commitment to unpacking layered systems of power, whether through spatial politics or domestic material culture. By turning her attention to the everyday, and using porcelain as a conceptual and historical medium, Al Shazly not only expands the terrain of her inquiry but also deepens it—positioning the domestic as a vital site where the legacy of empire is both preserved and performed.