Hana El-Sagini’s practice reimagines the everyday. Places, objects, and inherited stories depart from a deeply personal world, revealing the ties between people and the spaces they inhabit, and how these spaces shape our memories and experiences. Although classically trained as a painter, she works across sculpture and installation, experimenting with materiality, distortion, and scale as techniques of worldbuilding. 

From sprawling, organically braided bronze sculptures and fleshy bodily ceramics reconstructing a healthcare centre to a towering wooden moth hovering over a carpet slipper in a moment of suspended tension, her work transforms familiar objects and environments into something surreal. Through shifts in medium and perspective, she draws attention to the overlooked details and rituals of everyday life, reflecting on nature, intimate domestic spaces, and the unstable and uncertain human condition.

In 2022, El-Sagini was diagnosed with cancer, an experience that informed her artistic language and her exploration of invasiveness and survival. Following this period, she gravitated towards ceramics, drawn to the human-like nature of clay. Through the process of firing, clay undergoes immense pressure and change, much of which remains outside the artist’s control. This unpredictability became a way of thinking through the body, and the possibility of emerging from moments of adversity.

In her ceramic installation Counting Fingers, El-Sagini reimagines a healthcare space through more than 200 ceramic objects, transforming a typically sterile environment into something surreal. Medical waiting rooms, hospital corridors, and doctors’ offices are reconstructed through chairs bearing dog legs, an aquarium with coral made from bodily features, and a jar of candy filled with eyes. Working with clay’s natural variations in color, she reflects the different stages of sickness and health. The finger appears throughout the installation, functioning as shelves that protrude from walls or point accusingly outwards. The motif evokes poking, intrusion, and accusation, while also referencing examination, touch, and the body.

Expanding from this body of work, the braid became a central symbol in El-Sagini’s thinking around fragility and endurance. Hair, both part of the body and capable of being severed from it, becomes a site of attachment, loss, and regeneration. Across cultures, braiding carries associations of intimacy, care, and community. During her recovery, hair loss became inseparable from her experience of vulnerability, survival, and transformation.

El-Sagini began casting her fleshy ceramic sculptures in bronze, carrying the traces of touch and labour from one material into another. Rather than affirming bronze’s traditional associations with monumentality and permanence, she subdues its authority through hand-painted, muted grey patinas. The sculptures take on a quieter presence, suggesting age, fatigue, wisdom, and survival. Through this shift, bronze moves away from triumph and towards a more intimate understanding of endurance.

El-Sagini’s work inhabits and takes over the spaces it occupies, creating immersive environments in which familiar objects, materials, and bodily forms are transformed.

HANA EL-SAGINI (b. 1980, Egypt) is a multidisciplinary artist and educator living and working in Dubai, where she teaches at Zayed University. She studied at the Metafora Academy of Contemporary Art, Barcelona, and earned her MA in Fine Arts from the Academy of Art and Design FHNW, Basel. Her solo exhibitions include presentations at 421 Art Campus, Abu Dhabi (2024), and Zamalek Art Gallery, Cairo (2021, 2019, 2018). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Gypsum, Cairo (2026); the Saudi Arabia Museum of Contemporary Art (SAMoCA), Riyadh (2025); Al Riwaq, Manama (2024); and Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel (2022), among others. Her public commission for the Fondation Beyeler's 25th anniversary exhibition is held in the collection of Fenix Museum, Rotterdam.