Youssef Nabil’s Musée d’Orsay Homecoming, His Most Personal Show Yet

In 1992, a twenty-year-old Youssef Nabil arrived in France for the first time and walked into the Musée d’Orsay. He has spent more than three decades since translating what he saw there, the dream-states of Puvis de Chavannes, the spiritual interiors of Odilon Redon, the languid sensuality of the Orientalists, into a body of work as recognizable as any in contemporary photography: black-and-white silver prints, hand-coloured frame by frame, suspended somewhere between the Egypt of his childhood and an idealized Mediterranean that exists only on the threshold of memory.

This spring, the museum that altered the course of his practice has opened its painting galleries to him. “Youssef Nabil. To Dream Again (De rêver encore),” on view now through September 13, 2026, makes Nabil the first living artist invited to exhibit inside the d’Orsay’s “Artists in North Africa” rooms. Organized within the Mediterranean Season 2026 and France’s Bicentennial of Photography (2026–2027), the show is curated by Sylvain Amic, President of the Public Establishment of the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée de l’Orangerie, alongside Nicolas Gausserand, Advisor to the President.

A First for the Musée d’Orsay

It is rare for a working artist to be granted a sustained dialogue with the d’Orsay’s permanent painting collection — and rarer still for that dialogue to take place inside the rooms where Eugène Fromentin, Étienne Dinet, Alexandre Cabanel, and Jean Lecomte du Noüy currently hang. The decision marks both a gesture of contemporary openness for the institution and a deliberate reframing of Orientalism through the eyes of an artist born in Cairo in 1972, who has lived, worked, and self-portrayed across Egypt, France, and the United States.

Nabil does not arrive innocent of politics. He knows, as he has often said, that 19th-century Orientalism rests on a Western fantasy of the Maghreb and West Asia, frequently inseparable from colonial appropriation. But he also recognizes its visual vocabulary — its warmth, ornament, sensuality, light — as a vernacular he can repurpose. His Orient, as the exhibition makes clear, is not the Orient of the harem painters. It is sensual and consenting, populated by women in command of their own image, and free of the brutality projected onto it from the North.

Youssef Nabil: To Dream Again

The exhibition title comes from Act III, Scene 2 of The Tempest, in which Caliban, Shakespeare’s enslaved, mixed-race islander, often read as a figure for the colonized peoples of the Mediterranean, delivers a monologue of startling lyricism:

“Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not… and sometime voices, that, if I then had waked after long sleep, will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming, the clouds methought would open, and show riches ready to drop upon me; that, when I waked, I cried to dream again.”

Odilon Redon’s Sommeil de Caliban (c. 1895–1900), drawn from the d’Orsay’s collection, anchors the show as both image and key. For Nabil, the dream is never escape — it is the place where the world’s harshness can be answered, not denied. “Symbolists, like Nabil, do not deny the harshness of the world,” the curators write. “They claim their right to dream and the power of the imagination.”

Five Acts of a Mediterranean Journey

The hang unfolds chronologically, across five rooms, as the journey of an artist of our time, punctuated by transhistorical leaps.

A Nineteenth-century expedition photography opens the show: Maxime Du Camp, John Beasley Greene, Antonio Beato, Théodule Devéria, Harry C. Ellis. Nabil chose the works himself, drawn to what he describes as the timelessness of their subject, “a picturesque Egypt that seems to last forever to him.”

The artist’s childhood in Cairo, rendered in tender hand-coloured prints. Memory of a Happy Place (2021), Say Goodbye, Self-portrait Alexandria (2009), and I Will Go To Paradise, Self-portrait, Hyères lay out, in velvety tones, the ache of departure and the promise of elsewhere.

Puvis de Chavannes’s Le Rêve (1883) hangs in conversation with Nabil’s The Dream, self-portrait (2021) — his own answer, made decades later, and described by the curators as “a powerful affirmation of optimism against a background of global uncertainty.” Redon’s Sommeil de Caliban and Grand tapis de prière complete the spiritual architecture.

Next, Nabil’s portraits, including Natacha Atlas, Cairo (2000) and In Love, Denver (2012), are placed alongside Cabanel, Dinet, Fromentin, and Lecomte du Noüy. Where the 19th-century painters cast their odalisques as fated, Nabil’s women look back with what the curators call “self-assurance.”

Two films screen in rotation, including Nabil’s most recent, The Room (2025), a dialogue with Marina Abramović on death and the meaning of life. The second, I Saved My Belly Dancer (2015), stars Salma Hayek and Tahar Rahim, and works to preserve a vanishing Egyptian art form from the erosions of time and ideology.

The exhibition is illuminated throughout by Nabil’s own commentary on the Orsay paintings he selected as counterpoints to his work.

On Jean Lecomte du Noüy’s Ramsès dans son harem (1885–86): “This painting is a true distillation of academic Orientalism, reflecting fantasies about the East. The concept of the harem is an anachronism in an Egyptian context, as it stems from Ottoman folklore. Orientalism inspires me, and I apply these considerations in my film I Saved My Belly Dancer (2015). In it I reframe the idea of fantasy through the figure of the belly dancer.”

On Alexandre Cabanel’s Thamar (1875): “The light, the softness of the skin, and the richness of the fabrics are all inspirations that provide sustenance for my work exploring the odalisque theme. However the women in my work are represented as being confident, proud and free. There is a transition from the woman as a victim of fate to the woman as the one who takes control of her own life.”

On Odilon Redon’s Grand tapis de prière (c. 1908): “I have long been fascinated by the work of Odilon Redon, and his exploration of the world of dreams which also infuses my practice. I like this unrestricted symbolism, which you also see in my series of self-portraits… They come to symbolise the feeling of exile that lives within me, a yearning to return to a homeland that only exists in idealised memories in my work.”

The faces in those self-portraits, as visitors will notice, are almost always turned away. The melancholy is the point. So is the invitation.

The exhibition’s contemporary endpoint is The Room (2025), Nabil’s newest film, in which Marina Abramović embodies an angel who guides the artist toward what he describes as “a happier world, a sort of paradise materialised by a wedding ceremony, Farah in Arabic, which also means Joy.”

It is a fitting close to a show that uses the language of dreams to address the most material of subjects — exile, identity, mortality, the wish to return to a place that was perhaps never quite as one remembers it. Nabil’s answer is Caliban’s. He wakes, and he asks to dream again.

Visit Youssef Nabil. To Dream Again

Exhibition: Youssef Nabil. To Dream Again (De rêver encore) 
Dates: 19 May – 13 September 2026 
Venue: Musée d’Orsay, Level 0, Rooms 8 a, b, c 
Curators: Sylvain Amic, Nicolas Gausserand 
Context: Mediterranean Season 2026 · Bicentennial of Photography 2026–2027 
Address: Esplanade Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, 75007 Paris 
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