The sister of the diplomat and artist Mohammed Naghi, Effat was equally prodigious in her production of art works and outlived her brother to witness the construction of the new Aswan Dam. Her abstracted rendering of the Aswan Dam project offers an expressionist tone that depicts the complex scaffolding with its wooden and steel beams and ties. In this work, the choice of painting on wood provides a more direct reference to the material of the scaffolding itself. The work was likely part of a general commission for artists and writers, including her husband Saad El-Khadem, to document the construction of the Aswan Dam from the late 1950s until the mid-1960s.

In The High Dam, the structure is seemingly devoid of any living person. From a ground level vantage point, the viewer gazes up at the scaffold comprising pulleys and cranes and mechanical forms. The haphazard structure of tilted blocks and trusses appears on the verge of collapse and the viewer is left questioning whether its apparent frailty is intended to celebrate its achievement or point at the incomplete and tenuous nature of its construction.

The paintings and assemblages of Effat Naghi invoke traditional folklore, myth, magic and astrology. Hailing from an aristocratic family of esteemed artists, Naghi received encouragement from her influential older brother Mohammed at a young age. In 1947, she attended Rome’s Egyptian Academy to study frescos and mural painting, while in the mid-1950s she spent time researching magical rites and astrology at the Great Library of Cairo. Among a selection of artists chosen to observe and render the construction of Egypt’s High Dam in the 1960s, Naghi documented the ancient sites of Nubia before they were submerged under Lake Nasser. Exhibiting her work in Egypt and Europe, Naghi was awarded a full-time artist’s scholarship by the Ministry of Culture in 1973. In 2001, a museum dedicated to the display of her works opened in Heliopolis, Cairo.