Elevate: Rehab el Sedak

Elevate at 21c presents temporary exhibitions of works by artists living and working in the Northwest Arkansas community.

The program provides hotel guests and visitors with unique access to the work of notable regional artists, while featuring their work in the context of 21c’s contemporary art space.

Rehab El Sadek is a U.S.-based Egyptian interdisciplinary artist of Sudanese ancestry whose work operates at the intersection of conceptual installation art, archaeology, and collective memory. In a career spanning thirty years, she has exhibited in seventeen countries across four continents. Rooted in her Egyptian and Sudanese heritage, her practice investigates layered histories embedded in stone, pigment, and cloth, treating them as carriers of memory that connect the ancient world to contemporary diasporic experience. El Sadek often works with materials drawn from antiquity—such as gauze, wood, and earth pigments—and employs light, shadow, and mnemonic techniques to extend the presence of sculptural objects beyond their physical form.

El Sadek has received numerous awards and grants recognizing her innovative practice. In 2023, she received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and the Dallas Museum of Art Otis and Velma Davis Dozier Grant; in 2022, the Project Row Houses Southern Survey Biennial Prize; in 2021, the Gottlieb Foundation Grant and awards from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, Texas Vignette, and the National Performance Network; and in 2019, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant supported her first solo exhibition in North America. From 2017–18, she held a one-year appointment as the City of Austin’s first Artist-in-Residence embedded in the City’s Watershed Protection Department, investigating social and environmental issues.

Her fellowships and residencies include MacDowell (Carnegie Foundation Fellowship, 2020); Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (2022); McColl Center (2021); Anderson Center (2023); Fine Arts Work Center (2023–24); Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (2024); Vermont Studio Center (2020); Art Omi (2019); BAU Institute, France (2023); Thami Mnyele, Amsterdam (2004); and Gasworks, London (1998).

Across these experiences, El Sadek has consistently explored the convergence of material, memory, and environment, translating research into site- and material-specific works. Her practice continues to investigate how histories embedded in matter speak to contemporary audiences, creating dialogues between past and present, permanence and impermanence, culture and geography.