Agnes Michalczyk is a Polish-Austrian visual artist and educator living and working in Cairo. Graduated from the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig where she studied painting and printmaking, she teaches at the Faculty of Visual Arts European Universities in Cairo.

Her work explores the urban space of Cairo through female perspective focusing on the city and its narratives, real or imagined. She works in a variety of media, painting, drawing, and collage, between 2012-2016 mainly focusing on Street Art and since 2014 increasingly incorporating New Media in her practice contributing to different art projects in Cairo and abroad. Agnes is currently pursuing her doctoral research on immersive media and heritage in historic Cairo at Freie Universität Berlin.

Artist Statement

My work traces the relationship between women and the city — how female bodies move through, are shaped by, and push back against urban space. Working across painting, drawing, collage, street art, augmented reality, and virtual reality, I return again and again to Cairo as both site and subject. Early works intervened directly in the street, interrupting gendered codes written into public space. Over time, my practice has moved between surfaces and screens: from walls to canvases to immersive environments, each medium opening a different way to inhabit the city and question who it belongs to. Through AR murals in Historic Cairo and VR installations like Overwritten, I layer the remembered, the imagined, and the lived — making visible the histories and presences that the built environment buries or excludes. The female gaze is not a theme I apply to these spaces; it is the position from which I make. It shapes what I notice, what I insist on, and what I refuse to leave invisible.

Exhibitions