Bassem Yousri (Egyptian, b. 1980, based between Cairo and Berlin) is a visual artist, filmmaker, and art educator working with mixed-media installations in art galleries and public spaces and experimental and documentary films. Bassem leverages sarcasm and irony to criticize common stereotypes and social taboos, presenting commentary on contemporary Egyptian socio-politics through a focus on individual experience. His work also investigates issues related to the relationship between form and representation in the context of the exhibition and public spaces. Bassem received his MFA in painting, drawing and sculpture in 2009 from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia and his BFA in painting in 2003 from the School of Fine Arts at Helwan University in Cairo.

 

Bassem’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI) in New York, Centre Pompidou and Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, Sharjah Art Foundation’s Mathaf, the Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, the State Museum of Egyptian Art in Munich, and the Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (IVAM). He received a Fulbright Arts Grant in 2006 and an AFAC grant in 2012 and has partaken in several artist-in-residence fellowships with institutions such as RAIR Philly in 2022; ProHelvetia Switzerland in 2020; Vermont Studio Center in 2013 and 2018; Kultur Kontakt Austria in 2017; Arte East in New York in 2016; Sharjah Art Foundation in 2016; Kansas State University in 2011; and Kala Art Institute in California in 2010.