About page — Manar Moursi

Manar Moursi (b. 1983, Kuwait) is an Egyptian-Canadian artist, filmmaker, and scholar trained in architecture. Her artistic practice spans video, installation, performance, photography, sound, writing, and artist books. Her method is feminist: she reads family life and everyday practice for the political forces they carry, and political history for the personal lives within it. Her recurring subject is landscapes and their transformations, from urban public spaces such as sidewalks and mosques to coasts, deserts, and fields: how they are regulated, surveyed, extracted, and enclosed, and what this does to the people and ecologies that depend on them.

One project, The Loudspeaker and the Tower, grew from a decade of night drives along Cairo's Ring Road, photographing community-built mosques amid the informal urbanization of former agricultural land. The project became both an inquiry into who builds these structures and why, and a reckoning with her mother's death and her own shifting relationship to faith. Another, the Super 8 performance I Am Not Your Mummy, wraps and unwraps her body in packing tape at monuments to motherhood and Indigenous women in Mexico City and Veracruz, using the double meaning of "mummy" to set expectations of maternal care against the colonial extraction of Egyptian bodies and heritage.

Moursi is completing a PhD in the History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art at MIT. Her dissertation traces how the monarchy, Nasser, and Sadat transformed Bedouin grazing land on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast between the 1920s and the 1980s through convict labor, land laws, agricultural surveys, and resort planning. Reading these interventions alongside paintings and popular beach films, she argues that each regime pursued different ends but shared a premise: that it could treat the land as available and override customary claims and that leisure became one of extraction’s most effective disguises. The research feeds her multi-channel video installation Mound of Fortune, which she developed during her 2023–24 Harvard Film Study Center fellowship and presented as a work in progress at the Goethe-Institut Cairo in 2026.

Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, ARD in Cairo, and SOMA in Mexico City. Her artistic and research projects have been supported by the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture, Mophradat, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Toronto, Ontario, and Quebec Arts Councils. In 2023, she received MIT's Harold and Arlene Schnitzer Prize in the Visual Arts.

Her academic and creative writing has appeared in journals, edited volumes, artist publications, and self-published zines. She is co-author, with David Puig, of Sidewalk Salon: 1001 Street Chairs of Cairo. She has taught at the University of Toronto and the University of Waterloo.

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