At a glance
Hand-coloured photographs, cinema and self-portraiture turn memory into something dreamlike, suspended between Egypt, desire and the imagined past.
Why go
You'll see
Pace of visit
Don't miss
Artlovers Tip
Look back and forth between Nabil’s photographs and the historical works around them. The exhibition becomes much richer when you see how he borrows, questions and rewrites older images of the Orient.
Inside the exhibition
Meet the artist
Key Movements
Medium
Description
Youssef Nabil. De rêver encore is on view at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, France, from 19 May to 13 September 2026. Nabil is the first contemporary artist invited to occupy the museum’s Orientalist galleries, where his photographs and films are shown in relation to 19th-century works and Symbolist imagery that have shaped his visual language for more than three decades.
Youssef Nabil (b. 1972, Cairo) is a Franco-Egyptian photographer and filmmaker known for manually colouring black-and-white silver-gelatin photographs. His work draws on Egyptian cinema, portrait photography, self-representation, exile, desire and memory, creating images that feel simultaneously contemporary and from another era.
Worth travelling for?
A particularly good contemporary intervention at the Musée d’Orsay because the dialogue with the collection is not decorative: Nabil uses the museum’s own history to rethink memory, Orientalism and the way images construct identity.
Youssef Nabil — De rêver encore
Hours & rating from Google
