In her poetic expressionism, Tahia Halim transforms this scene of a market place in Upper Egypt into a nostalgic allegory for a time before Nubians were displaced by the building of the Aswan High Dam. Halim’s practice in both painting and ceramic are often described as being folkloric in approach. In this 1960s painting from the later part of Halim’s career, she focuses on the difficult position of the Nubian woman, who is about to lose her home. As the construction of the dam resulted in the subsequent formation of Lake Nasser, flooding Nubian villages. Halim features the Nubian woman as a protagonist against a backdrop of impending seismic change.

The daughter of a civil servant for King Fuad, Halim grew up in the palace grounds and received an excellent education. She studied at Cairo’s Academy of Fine Arts and in 1943 met the Egyptian artist Hamed Abdallah. They married at the end of World War II and moved to Paris where she attended the Académie Julian between 1949 and 1951. In 1951, the couple returned to Cairo where they opened a studio. In 1958, she began exhibiting in London, where she was the first woman to be awarded the Guggenheim International Prize. The Guggenheim Museum in New York later purchased her painting Hanan (Tenderness). She received numerous other awards and exhibited at the 1955, 1960 and 1970 Venice Biennale in the Egyptian Pavilion as well as in various European venues.