Masha Kirasirova - Cairo in the Eye of Gulf Capital

This lecture will be hosted on Thursday, 21 May 2026 at 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm.

Cairo in the Eye of Gulf Capital: Imagining the Future through Real Estate Development and Art

This talk explores how Egypt’s future is envisioned in the Gulf. It begins with utopian representations by UAE real estate investment agencies, epitomized by Emaar’s multi-billion-dollar projects in Egypt, which are reshaping Cairo and the wider Arab region into a hierarchy organized around Gulf capital, finance, and spectacle. These glossy (often AI-generated) visuals and optimistic, auction-like language recur in consultants' and developers' reports and in UAE museums, all of which market Egypt as a field of “opportunities.”

The talk then contrasts these utopian “Cairoubai” futures with more critical perspectives from urban historians, political economists, dystopian literature, theater, and visual artists who document currency crises, bailout diplomacy, land and water conflicts, resistance to gentrification, evictions, and the erosion of local life in the face of Gulfanization (Khalganat Misr).

The talk ends by considering new relationships between art and development: how do art institutions and markets in the Gulf enable critique while simultaneously feeding back into real-estate value, and how do new experiments with development in Egypt pursue slower, art-driven renovations in search of more locally grounded models of urban development?

About the Speaker

Masha Kirasirova is an Associate Professor of History at New York University Abu Dhabi. Her work examines exchanges between the modern Middle East and Soviet Eurasia, focusing on state-led efforts to transform natural and built environments, political culture, theories of empire, histories of the future, and aesthetics. She is the author of The Eastern International: Arabs, Central Asians, and Jews in the Soviet Union’s Anticolonial Empire (Oxford University Press, 2024), as well as a co-editor of Russian-Arab Worlds: A Documentary History (Oxford University Press, 2023) and The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties (Routledge, 2018). She is currently working on two edited volumes: one on the visual cultures of the Aswan High Dam and another on comparative futurisms, as well as a monograph about models of development in Egypt situated within Cold War geopolitics and regional circuits of capital, expertise, and culture.

Attention!

The lecture starts at 6 pm. The number of seats is limited and we work on a first-come, first-served basis. We open our doors at 5:30 and close them at 6:15 or earlier in case the lecture room reaches its full capacity.