Current Exhibition

Cosmovision, a solo exhibition by Lara Baladi - 29th October 2025 - 11th January 2026

Tintera is delighted to announce Cosmovision, a major exhibition of over 100 works by acclaimed Lebanese-Egyptian artist Lara Baladi. Spanning more than a decade of her practice from 1996 to 2011, with a few works extending beyond this period, it highlights pivotal moments in regional history interwoven with the diaristic. The show features many carefully selected never-before-seen images, and explores the intersections of memory, myth, and socio-politics. This is Baladi’s first solo exhibition in Cairo since returning from living in the US for nine years. Baladi’s approach to photography transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary by distilling profound narratives and by imbuing themwith deep meaning. Through her lens, fleeting moments of joy, of grief, of popular visual culture, and of human experience becomeenduring testaments to life's intricate tapestry. Many works created in Cairo are rich with playful scenes of abundance, decay, and the traces of the everyday. Through her attentive eye, ephemera, from broken phones to poorly painted paradisal landscapes, are elevated into poignant testimony. As a multimedia artist, Baladi uses photography as both document and language—recording, referencing, and reimagining visual culture within her expansive installations. She has collected images throughout her extensive travels—from Gaza to Japan, from Mali to England, to Pakistan, from Lebanon to Egypt. The exhibition is framed by two of her monumental collages, Oum el Dounia (2000) and Sandouk el Dounia (2001), both large scale works whose richly symbolic landscapes traverse both ‘creation’ and ‘apocalypse.’ Acting as bookends to a visual journey, and parallel to the politics and upheavals of the time, these mirror works anchor the exhibition for the viewer and further expand on Baladi’s practice— the meticulous weaving of images and characters into elaborate allegories, creating complex tapestries that intertwine art history, religious iconography and political commentary. Commissioned by the Fondation Cartier in Paris and the Nitaq Festival in Cairo, during a period of significant regional and global political flux, these collages not only resonate with the sociopolitical climate of their time but also illuminate Baladi’s distinctive artistic practice. Crucially, these grand narratives are infused with the fabric of daily life, grounding the personal with the political and the cosmic. This interplay between the monumental, the mundane, the traditional, the contemporary, and the mythical, is a hallmark of Baladi’s enduring artistic vision, and exemplifies her ability to transcend conventional boundaries in photography. The exhibition is an unfolding of the artist’s aesthetic vocabulary. It charts a journey that reflects her ongoing exploration of image- making and the development of her visual language— a kind of alphabet that the viewer can trace throughout her career. The images are seamlessly integrated into the overall installation, many with her signature saturation of colour and embrace of excess. Cosmovision encapsulates Baladi’s artistic vision and her understanding of the world’s inherent interconnectedness.

Lara Baladi (b.1969) is a Lebanese-Egyptian artist, archivist, writer and educator, recognized internationally for her multidisciplinary works. Her artistic practice spans photography, video, sculpture, architecture and multimedia installations. Driven by critical exploration of historical archives and popular visual culture, Baladi’s work examines the intersection of myth, memory, socio-political narratives, and the cyclical nature of history. Baladi has received fellowships and artist residencies from the Civitella Foundation (2025), Al Mawrid Center, New York University Abu Dhabi (2023), MIT’s Ida Ely Rubin Artist in Residence and MacDowell, New Hampshire (2015), Art Omi, NY and MIT’s Open Documentary Lab (2014), and the Japan Foundation (2003). For two decades, she played a pivotal role on the boards of the Arab Image Foundation in Lebanon and the Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art in Egypt. Baladi’s work has been published, exhibited and featured internationally—at the Fondation Cartier and Centre Pompidou (France), Transmediale (Germany), the Gwangju Biennial (South Korea), the Hasselblad Foundation (Sweden), the Cairo Art Fair, Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) (Egypt), Malhoun Art (Morrocco) among others. In 2008, Baladi’s architectural construction and sound installation, Borg El Amal (The Tower of Hope), received the first Grand Cobra prize at the Cairo Biennale of Contemporary Art. Ongoing since 2011, her project Vox Populi: Tahrir Archives encompasses a series of artworks, media initiatives, publications, and the web-based open-source portal Entanglement, Egypt, 2013. Anatomy of Revolution, an ABC and Archive of Revolts and Revolutions. In 2025, this online platform was selected for the IDFA Forum, to be reimagined as a new and mixed-media, immersive installation. From 2016 to 2022, she lectured in MIT’s Program in Art, Culture, and Technology (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). For the 2023–4 academic year, she was a visiting researcher at the American University’s Law and Society Research Unit (LSRU) and at the Center for Economic, Legal, and Social Studies and Documentation (CEDEJ), in Cairo, Egypt. Since 2024, she has been an Associate Professor of Practice in the Visual Arts Program, Department of Arts at the American University in Cairo.