Voicing the Speechlessness of Female Survivors – engl.
Hagar Masoud and Angelika Stepken
The following text is a collage of fragments: parts are from an email conversation between Hagar and me, parts are from Hagar’s manuscripts on various occasions. Short interludes create bridges for understanding.
We met the first time in 2014. It was my first visit to Cairo after the bloody suppression of the so called „Arab Spring“ in 2011. I discovered Hagar Masoud’s work at the (25). Salon of the Youth at the Palace of Arts, a life performances with dancers, sound and video projection. „Building Habits and Daily Practices“ was dealing with the concept of how society gets constructed through mental, social and economic patterns and rehearsal. It was absolutely unique amidst the conventional paintings of other young Egyptian artists. Hagar was 25 years old at this moment. I was deeply impressed by her analytic approach and courageous, independent artistic language. Since then we kept in loose contact. Only years later I learned that she had applied several times n previous years for the Salon of the Youth, a competition run by the Ministry of Culture in Egypt for emerging local artists, and always had been rejected. „I had been honest – perhaps too honest – in the work I submitted“ (H.M.). During the revolution, in parallel with political events on Mohamed Mahmoud Street at Tahrir Square, as part of the Youth Salon (22), she realized “Koty,” a site-specific adaptive performance in front of the Palace of Arts at the Cairo Opera House: she was wearing a colorful military helmet and offering free popcorn to all people who passed by. „When food is offered by the same hands that kill citizens, but the citizens need to fulfill an essential need to survive, they accept receiving their food.“ (H.M.) At that time she had already completed a professional training as an artist and photographer in Cairo, participated in several workshops on conceptual photography work, art criticism, new media and electronic sound. In 2012 she was a fellow at MASS Alexandria, an independent and innovative study program initiated by artists Wael Shawky and curator Sarah Rifky. Through MASS she was able to collaborate 2012 at dOCUMENTA(13) in Kassel, Germany. as an assistant and photographer with the artists Tarek Atoui and Theaster Gates.
My journey as an interdisciplinary artist is rooted in my experiences, particularly my upbringing in Cairo, Egypt. The cultural, social, and familial conditions I moved through shaped my path. In a context where discussions of gender, women’s bodies, and feminism are often taboo, I witnessed systemic silence around issues such as Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) and domestic violence. This motivated me to commit to a socially engaged practice, working through oral histories, collective memory, and digital media.
My father passed away when I was nine months old. My sister was twenty-three months old, and my mother was pregnant with my brother. Losing my father was, and still is, a deep grief for me. I encountered disappearance and death early in my life.
“The neighbors‘ children used to call me „chicken thigh“ and clap whenever I walked down the street.” Despite my mother approaching their mothers several times, nothing changed.
I grew up aware of my body as a site where identity and appearance were constantly criticized. This shaped my early understanding of the body as a field of battle.
In Cairo, girlhood came with unspoken rules, often passed down by women who loved us but had also been taught to survive through silence.
I was taught silence before I learned to speak.
During this time, art and writing were my way to survive. The blank page became a room I could enter without asking permission. I did not trust anyone. I trusted books and paper. I trusted writing. I used to write my thoughts, then cut them into small pieces, so no one could guess what I was thinking. Writing was my way to protect myself and to speak without danger. I learned that language could survive when the body cannot speak, and that secrecy can be a trusted structure, not a weakness.
I support the hijab when it is a woman’s choice. I covered my head for most of my life, from childhood until 2011. In 2008, it felt impossible to imagine taking off my hijab, or talk about it. My mother believed it was the right thing for me. So instead, I created a conceptual work that said NO, repeated endlessly in my native language, using a digital font printed on translucent paper. I used the printed text to wrap my head and body, including my hands, then tore through those layers to uncover my face and hands. That work was dismissed from taking part of the Youth Salon (20) in 2009.
In Egypt, my work was invisible. As early as 2008, I started making work on women’s rights, gender-based violence, and the female body. It was minimized, mocked, and institutionally rejected.
Documenta was a powerful and unforgettable encounter with the possibilities of contemporary art. It opened something in me that never fully closed. It charged me with a sense of urgency and purpose to continue making art until my last day alive. I even proposed a site-specific sound installation work around the lake in Karlsaue Park to the main curator of dOCUMENTA(13). It was not received well, and it made me realize early on that institutions have limits in what they can hold, and that my work would often exist in tension with those limits.
I was at a party in the residence of a dOCUMENTA (13) curator. I was enjoying myself and standing on my own in the main living room. I was wearing Paige pants and a fuchsia blouse. In Egypt, I had learned to cover my body. I used to wear an extra-long loose peach netted cardigan as protection. That night, I felt safe, so I chose not to wear it.I was tasting marinated octopus for the first time. I have always loved this animal. It looks soft, but it is intelligent and strong. When attacked, it releases ink to disappear and survive.
At one moment, I turned my back. I placed my plate on a small hanging shelf. Someone slipped a hand into my pants without my consent. The touch was warm and loaded with feeling. I still feel it today as if it just happened. It shifted my body into silence. I looked into his eyes and saw a shift from desire to fear, reflected in my shocked reaction. My body stopped feeling like my own. I stepped away and said nothing. What remained was the silence that followed, and how it was embedded inside me. I felt that all the safety I had believed existed in Germany was demolished. I was a baby octopus, and they were a shark. The baby octopus was taught to stay silent, so how could it speak in that situation?
This stayed with me. It shaped how I understand safety, visibility, and voice. It continues to inform how I think about silence and the conditions under which my work exists.
Following her experiences in Kassel, which were as encouraging for her as an artist as they were re-traumatizing for her as a woman, Hagar received invitations to residencies and exhibitions across Europe. Across these contexts, she encountered recurring forms of gendered violence and colonial humiliation that began to shape her understanding of the structures within which her work exists.
At that time, I was awarded a prize by the French Institute in Cairo and Paris to be an artist in residence at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. This was my first successful application for major recognition, and it initiated a shift in how I approached my work.
During that period in Paris, my body was entered without my consent and introduced a new form of grief in me. I started writing intensely. I created a mind map of what I had been through, from my birth in July 1989 to March 2016. I was surprised by what I created. All this happened to one body, mine. That mind map was not only a personal record. It became my first attempt to see my life as narrative architecture, where trauma is produced and structured.
I was frightened and ashamed to speak.
There was one question I could not answer: Why don’t you return to Cairo?
Silence was my only answer.
I was terrified of returning after the assault. I believed that my mother and family would kill and bury me. In Egypt, a woman can be punished for what is done to her. This is how silence is learned, carried, and enforced.
In 2019, I was invited as a visiting international artist to the Kunstuniversität Linz, where I delivered a lecture and exhibited work-in-progress created with women survivors in Cairo. Other artists and art professionals looked down on me. They spoke about women in Egypt and the Arab world as suppressed, and living in tents. They described art in Africa – where Egypt is located as “exotic”, while closing their eyes to the history of colonialism in Africa and the colonial laws behind gender-based violence in these contexts.
Then a German artist presented herself as a political artist. She had found a bag of different – colored silk fabrics on the street. We were three international artists in residence, gathered for dinner, trying to guess what these objects were used for. I said theycould belong to a woman who had recently immigrated and decided to take off her hijab. From there, I shared a personal experience. I told her: I had covered my head without consent for most of my life, and then I took it off and donated all of them at once, in October 2011. Itwas a painful and difficult act, one that placed me in a deeply tense and vulnerable position within my family. I said clearly, this is a personal story, I am sharing it during this dinner conversation, and I want it to stay between us.
The next day, I went to support her open studio and found that she had gathered the fabrics, built a tent, and written a sentence on a wall in a public green space near the residency house. She was telling my personal story to the audience as the basis of her work. She took my private experience, one that carried risk, conflict, and intimacy in my own life, and turned it into her own public artwork, although I had shared it in confidence and without consenting to its use. She recast it as a work about liberating Arab women from the oppression of the hijab, reframing my story through the myth of Western freedom and rescue.
I was speechless.
I told her she had no right to use my personal story in her work. The situation was bitter. I felt exposed, humiliated, and alone. The other artists supported her, including the director of the residency house. I was unsure how to proceed or take legal action, especially since the institution supported the work and did not question the use of my lived experience without my permission.
I witnessed trauma settling in the body, carrying into personal relationships, and interfering with professional life. I was moving through spaces that describe themselves open, progressive, international. And I was learning, again and again, that the structures of power inside them were not so different from the ones I had left behind.
My story was stolen.
In Cairo, they would have called it gossip.
In Linz, they called it art.
I went back to Cairo. Back to the women. Back to work that no one could take from me.
In 2019, in Cairo, I continued my early work on gender-based violence toward women in post-colonial societies. I collaborated with two women, both survivors of FGM. One of them experienced sexual harassment at the age of five, and underwent FGM at the age of six, in the same house, in the same body. She was also the one who used to play there alone, holding the rooftop as a safe space. I listened to their testimonies, which held both pain and a desire for healing.
We had a precious chance to access the house where they had undergone FGM at the ages of six and eight. The house was about to be sold and demolished. It was an abandoned house with a huge rooftop and monstrous old trees, holding the stories of those who once lived there. I visited the house daily for three months, producing a series of videos, audio recordings, and performative photography.
By listening to her memories of the rooftop and guided by her favorite color, I worked with her and her mother, a designer, to develop a series of retro red dresses inspired by designs her mother used to make for her. Each dress corresponded to a different stage of her life, ages three to six, seven to ten, and eleven early adulthood.
After the dresses were made, I brought them to the rooftop and developed a series of photo-based performances drawn from her childhood memory of physical movement, forms of play, and interaction with the surrounding nature. I performed on the stairs, working through the memory of her first experience of sexual harassment. I collaborated with a six-year-old actress, with her consent and her parent’s permission. Together, we performed and created a narrative of the survivor’s timeline in the space.
In 2020, during the COVID-19 lockdown, I took part in an online residency with Gallery Window Winnipeg in Canada, where I took over their Instagram account for a week. I attempted to engage audiences through this series under the title „Samira’s Tales“ During a conversation with one of the curators, she suggested that this work might be perceived as reinforcing Islamophobia and hate toward Muslims in Western contexts. This revealed a tension I had already felt in Linz: how work addressing gender-based violence, made by an Egyptian Muslim woman artist, risks being redirected into other political narratives entirely, shaped by a colonial gaze rather than received on its own terms.
Gender-based violence is rooted in colonialism. It takes place everywhere.
Colonial powers created laws that structured violence against women in the societies they occupied, and many of those laws remained after independence. FGM is part of this history. When colonial powers occupied these territories, they did not introduce laws to prevent it. In some cases, they allowed it to continue, while some communities also turned to it as a form of cultural resistance and identity under occupation. The wound has many layers. And when women from the MENA region speak about this today, their testimonies are too often exoticized or dismissed, while the same violence happening in Western contexts is treated as an exception, not a system.
I tasted the bitterness and discrimination of what white feminism means in the West before I ever read about it. I look at works by women artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Judy Chicago, Nan Goldin, and Marina Abramović, whose works discuss violence in different layers and are widely read. But work from the Middle East and the Global South is often reframed through dominant Western narratives, instead of being perceived as it was created.
Female Genital Mutilation is not just an act. It is a system, an instrument of control over female bodies, a multigenerational wound passed down through care and protection. When I speak about FGM, or what some cultures call cutting or female circumcision, I speak from a place that holds both memory and resistance, a place that lives in my body.The languages and silences across cultures shape how this practice is named, understood, and sometimes medicalized. But no matter the name, it remains a violent tradition that marks the bodies of girls, often in the name of purity, honor, or belonging.
This system shaped the world I grew up in. It lived in the language around me, in what was said and what was never spoken.
I resisted the silence and the normalization of violence that surrounded me. These were social conditions, carried through the language of care within my family. Fear of speaking was planted in me early, shaped through words I heard repeatedly:
What will people say?
I sacrificed my life for you and your siblings.
You will shame the family.
I protected you.
Now you want your father’s family to say I failed in raising you well?
Violence was reframed as love.
He loves you.
He beat you because you don’t listen.
You wanted to travel alone, should a girl travel alone and sleep outside her family home?
He gave you gifts to make it up to you.
We were all beaten and we are fine.
You are too sensitive.
You are exaggerating.
These statements did not appear as violence.
They appeared as care, as protection, as discipline.
They shaped how silence was learned, justified, and internalized.
I remember a moment from when I was nine. I went on a school trip to the Egyptian Puppet Theater in Cairo. The room felt dim and unreal. It felt like another world had opened. The puppets moved as if they carried lives that could speak what humans could not. That experience stayed with me. It taught me that stories move through bodies, voices, and pauses. It also raised a question that still guides my work: how do we witness stories that carry pain without reproducing harm?
„Sound became crucial to me because I spent my life searching for the sound of my father’s voice, which I never heard.“ That absence shaped my sensitivity to sound and its role in narrative, memory, and loss. I approach sound as an intimate medium. It holds presence, and it also holds distance. It can carry memory without demanding a face. Active listening forms the core of my method. Through analytical listening, I study sound sources, interruptions, frequencies, and duration. I listen to how power enters the everyday, through noise regulations, public speech, collective rhythms, and sudden silences. Over time, my listening became spatial. I learned to hear the room as architecture, and to treat sound as layers and a geometry that shapes how bodies move and relate.
Since 2010, this sensitivity became a practice. I began building Sound of Urban Cities, a long-term audio archive through field recording in public spaces, starting at Ramsis Train Station in Cairo and expanding to Alexandria, Paris, Florence, and Casablanca. I compose using experimental techniques that treat sound as both evidence and form, layering field recordings with electronic manipulation and archival fragments, including cassette tapes recorded by Egyptian families for relatives living abroad in the 1980s in their native language. These tapes functioned as audio mail. I also work with traditional Egyptian instruments such as the arghoul, Egyptian children’s songs from the 1990s, and experimental piano. My distance from Cairo sharpened my awareness of its density and complexity in relation to other cities, each carrying its own auditory identity, its own geography of sound.
In 2022, after years of acceptances that could not be realized due to lack of funding and scholarships, Hagar was accepted to pursue an MFA at Stony Brook University in New York, where she also received a position as Instructor of Record. Since then, she has been living between the United States and Egypt. In 2025, she completed her thesis, „The Body Remembers: Trauma, Performing FGM, Gendered Violence, and Decolonial Resistance in Feminist Art.“
Being in the US gave me the space I had never had before to work closely with women survivors of gender-based violence, to speak without fear, and to bring silenced voices into the gallery space. To be heard. To be witnessed for the first time, in their lives and in mine.
„Wooden Room,Wedding Room“ (2024) reimagines the interiors of Egyptian middle-class living rooms from the 1980s, domestic spaces shaped by colonial history, transforming them into a space of testimony and witnessing. Women share their lived experiences of FGM while I serve Egyptian tea with mint and tropical fruits to visitors. FGM is performed in these domestic settings in Egypt. The living room is a space for hospitality, storytelling, celebration, and joy yet often the hidden site of violence. I begin peeling oranges, a metaphor for the act of cutting in FGM, while the first testimony speaks for one minute, followed by ten seconds of silence before the second narrator begins. This pattern continues until all the survivors have spoken, followed by six minutes of silence.
Survivors speak in their native language, with no transcript provided. I made this decision to protect the integrity of their voices and to resist translation as a form of control. English, as a dominant language, carries a colonial history that shapes how these testimonies are received. Keeping their voices in their native language was also a decision to protect their agency and the intimacy of their experience. Translation would not carry the same meaning or feeling. The work was not made to be fully understood by an English-speaking audience. It was made to be witnessed.
The installation includes bronze vulva sculptures cast from a survivor’s body, stitched handmade Japanese paper, and traditional Egyptian Khayamiya tapestry, connecting bodily memory with ritual, care, and resistance. In the back of the room, a playground-like space made of balloons dipped in asphalt and scattered puzzle pieces evokes lost girlhood, while a pre-wedding scene drawn from testimony reveals how violence hides beneath the surface of tradition. The entire room becomes an archive of sound, silence, sculpture, and memory, where pain is made visible and private histories are brought into public consciousness.
„Pantalon“ (2025) is a large aluminum blade, 8 x 4 feet, marked with silver vinyl letters. It extends this inquiry into public space by treating monumentality as a site of feminist research. The sculptural form functions as an embodied archive, inscribing participant-chosen aliases alongside their dates of birth and FGM, as symbolic dates of their death, as participants described them, with informed consent. I developed the work with women across generations, from participants born in 1933 to those born in 2005. This structure allows me to trace the chronology of FGM in Egypt through lived memory and to analyze how disclosure, consent, and public address shift over time. The work treats collective memory as a research field rather than a display. It asks how feminist monuments can register trauma without spectacle, and how abstraction can protect identity while sustaining collective remembrance.
The word pantalon means „pants“ in French and is still used in some post-colonial societies colonized by France. I named the project based on the testimony of one of the survivors who contributed to the work. With her mother’s support, she was invited into the living room to take measurements for new pants. It turned into an FGM procedure.
While working on my thesis, I engaged with writers such as bell hooks and Gloria Anzaldúa, whose work considers radical visibility as a political act shaped by power, marginality and voice. For me, radical visibility is about refusing erasure. It is about standing in my truth in a world that has taught me to stay quiet, small, and unseen. It is not only about being seen, but about being seen with power, on my own terms.
In my practice, radical visibility emerges when I mark names onto metal or bring silenced voices into public space. When I memorialize the moment a girl was cut, it is not only mourning, but also a declaration that she existed, she matters, and she will not be erased. My work insists on being seen while holding pain and power together, creating space for others to do the same.
Since I was six years old, I went to the nearest public library every day. I grew up between books. Books made me who I am today. Reading in my native language, Arabic, is precious. It is where my mind rests.
Text was always a tool within Hagar’s interdisciplinary practice, but writing remained private, a safe space she returned to alone. Now, after the thesis, that is changing. She wants to write a novel in Arabic and English, situated between her Cairo and Paris life. Writing as a lonesome practice turns into a home place, into a narrative architecture, into activating memory work, deserting from a traumatic past and present.
It is still challenging to speak freely. However, I will not be buried until I take these stories, this trauma, these social constraints and political fears out of my body. My story will be heard.
I want to create art, make film, and write in a way that breaks the silence forced on women. I want to write without causing harm, and without reducing women to symbols. I want women to remain human on the page, complicated, angry, funny, contradictory, alive.
Hagar Masoud is an Egyptian multi-media artist and writer, born 1989 in Cairo and living since 2022 between New York and Cairo. www.hagarmasoud.com
Published May 15, 2026
angelika stepken - writing in agonistic zones 
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