Artist in Residence, Stockholm, 1 September–15 November 2026

Omnia Sabry is an artist and filmmaker living and working in Cairo and Alexandria. She approaches plants as spatial beings, delving into their architecture and their ability to both reflect and transmit images. Her practice is rooted in film and extends into photography, bookmaking, and botany, sometimes expanding into multimedia installation. She experiments with the materiality of film and the ephemerality of light. Her work manoeuvres between language and image to conjure memory, shed light on unearthed histories, and dwell on places that no longer exist, are in transformation, or are yet to exist.

Omnia Sabry

She is part of Seeds of Doubt, a collective of artists, researchers, and filmmakers—Dana Salama, Mena El Shazly, Omnia Sabry, and Rana El Mahallawy—who critically engage with Egyptian landscapes and botanical histories through dialogues on the political stakes of archives, expertise, and methodology.

During her residency at IASPIS, Omnia will deepen her investigation into the work of Vivi Täckholm, a Swedish botanist based in Cairo who produced seminal research on Egypt’s flora and co-founded the Botanical Institute at Cairo University in the 1940s. In Stockholm, she will research botanical collections, conduct site visits, and engage in conversations with curators and artists working across film, agriculture, and botany.

She has collaborated with and exhibited or presented work at IDFA (2025), Biennale College Arte of the Venice Biennale (2024), Beirut Art Center (BAC) (2023), Kunsthal Aarhus (2023), MUCEM (2023), BOZAR (2022), Vienna Biennale (2021), The Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts (2019), and Qalandiya International Biennial (2018), among others.

https://omniasabry.com/

Image credits Photo 1:

From The Sacred Blue Lily (2020–), Orman Garden, Giza, Egypt. 120mm colour negative film. Courtesy of the artist.