What would the pharaoh Tutankhamun have said upon being discovered by archaeologist Howard Carter in 1922? The artist Sara Sallam wonders about this forgotten perspective and questions the colonial heritage. As part of the exhibition series Reconsidering photography, she was invited to immerse herself in the photography and antiquities collections of the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (MK&G) and to respond by presenting new and existing work. Sallam’s research-based practice encompasses photography, videos, writing, archival interventions and making artist books. In multimedia installations and publications, she often develops counter-narratives to historical accounts from colonial contexts. I prayed for the resin not to melt (2022), for example, presents an alternative history of Tutankhamun’s first encounter with Western archaeology. The pharaoh himself describes the opening of his coffin and the unwrapping of his mummified body, an account that exposes the violent approach taken by the archaeologists. In this way, the artist counters the supposedly objective findings of science with a subjective perspective and revives the ancestors of her past.

Sara Sallam (b. 1991) is a multidisciplinary artist who grew up in Egypt and now lives in the Netherlands. She studied media design, documentary photography, and film and photographic studies in Cairo, London and Leiden. Sallam’s work has been featured in numerous international exhibitions, for example at the Art & History Museum in Brussels (2023), the Magnum Foundation in New York (2022), the Museo Egizio in Turin (2022) and the Sharjah Art Foundation (2021).

In the exhibition series Reconsidering photography, themes and positions, as well as gaps, in the MK&G’s Photography and New Media Collection are critically examined by means of contemporary artistic interventions. In parallel, the museum is working on adding works by other photographers of migrant origin