Pansee Abou ElAtta is an Egyptian-Canadian scholar, visual artist, curator. Through both research and art practice, her work examines receptions of Ancient Egypt from the eighteenth century through the present, using Critical Museology and decolonial methodologies to envision liberatory possibilities for archives and collections.
She is an artist-research fellow in the NWA-funded Pressing Matter research project, investigating the potentialities of ‘colonial objects’ to support societal reconciliation with the colonial past. As part of this project, her large-scale interactive art installation is now exhibited as part of a group exhibition at the Wereldmuseum Amsterdam titled Unfinished Pasts: return, keep, or...? (from 9 May 2025 to 3 January 2027).
She is a former research fellow as part of Inherit, a BMBF-funded Käte Hamburger Kolleg based at the Humboldt University of Berlin, examining historical, contemporary and future transformations in heritage. Through this fellowship, her research investigated the way the concept of Ḥurma (Arabic: autonomy, dignity, privacy, honour) may be implemented to more ethically re-consider the collection, exhibition, and study of Ancient Egyptian mummified human remains.
Currently, she is (remotely) completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Carleton University, Canada, as part of Mobile Subjects, Contrapuntal Modernisms, in which she is producing artistic data visualizations representing the circulation of artists from the decolonizing world through the colonial and artistic capitals of London and Paris in the mid-century era.
Visiting Fellowship
As a NINO Visiting Research Fellow, she is working on a project titled “What can Ancient Egyptian mummies tell us about Dutch collection histories?” which examines the ontological positioning and re-positioning of Ancient Egyptian human remains through different Dutch museum collections as a means of better understanding how Dutch museology has framed the boundaries of the ‘human’. This project asks: how can these collections, which loom so large in public imaginations, help us understand the different ways that the human body has been defined and codified in the Netherlands?
Particularly through the 19th and 20th century, Ancient Egyptian human remains entered diverse Dutch museum collections: ones centered around history, archaeology, anthropology, medicine, anatomy, naturalia, and more. Accordingly, their conceptualization and taxonomization has varied in accordance with exhibitionary and institutional goals; they are posited as artifacts, medical specimens, anthropological case studies, Biblical records, curios, or trophies. Tracing these ontological transformations reveals the ways that Egypt – a place seen as both foreign yet familiar – and Egyptian bodies are cast by Dutch collecting institutions as a constitutive force demarcating the boundaries of diverse taxonomic categories, and in so doing, communicating conceptualizations of the ‘human’ to broad audiences.
