For five years Forever Is Now has been transforming the Giza plateau into a passageway between eras, an open bridge where contemporary art measures itself against the weight (and power) of one of humanity’s oldest narratives. The new edition, open until December 6th 2025, is a collective ritual that once again questions time, memory and permanence.
Curated by Art D’Égypte / Culturvator and its founder Nadine Abdel Ghaffar, the exhibition brings together ten international artists, each invited to interpret the idea of “forever” in dialogue with the Pyramids. Not as a simple backdrop, but as a living entity, a symbol of a humanity that tried to anchor its presence to eternity. In the Giza desert, materials become languages, symbols are recoded, and each installation becomes a gateway where past and future stop being opposites.
Michelangelo Pistoletto presents a new version of the Third Paradise, built with marble scraps from quarries all over the world. It’s a gesture that turns residue into possibility, that speaks of regeneration and of a balance still possible between nature and the artificial. Vhils, on the other hand, uses doors collected in Cairo: he carves them, metaphorically opens them, and turns them into thresholds that hold faces, stories and traces of a fragile humanity confronted with the millennia-old stillness of the Pyramids.
Mert Ege Köse looks to the symbol of the Shen, a ring of protection and infinity, and reinterprets it in monumental forms that seem to suspend time. Recycle Group, with their installation Null, tell the other side of our era: human figures trapped in a plastic net, a metaphor for a present swallowed by the digital dimension.
J-Park infuses the sand with a triangular structure that speaks through numerical codes and steel reflections: a dialogue between ancient mathematics and digital noise, between cosmology and glitch. Alex Proba and SolidNature transform marble and onyx into Echoes of the Infinite, a fluid architecture that recalls the lotus, the scarab, the Milky Way. The surfaces change with the light, as if the matter itself were breathing together with the Pyramids.
Nadim Karam presents three “desert flowers”, made with recycled materials: REBIRTH, SUN, CREATION are totems that speak of metamorphosis, memory and resilience. Ana Ferrari, instead, gives shape to the wind: WIND is a spiral of twenty-one metal flutes that transform the desert currents into a soundscape, a cosmic echo that resonates between sand and sky.
With White Totem of Light King Houndekpinkou weaves Benin, Japan and Egypt into a single ceramic body, a contemporary altar that speaks of protection and shared spirituality. The journey ends with Egyptian artist Salha El Masry, who reinterprets a royal ring in a monumental structure dedicated to Maat, the goddess of order and justice. The text engraved from the Book of the Dead thus becomes a visible pact between power and the people, an invitation to look at eternity not as destiny, but as responsibility.
The strength of Forever Is Now, this year as well, lies in its nature as a crossing: an experience that does not simply celebrate the greatness of the ancient, but reactivates it, projecting it into the present. Each work is a gesture that makes history still vulnerable, still open, still audible. After all, in front of the Pyramids of Giza, art can only do this: remind us that eternity is not a monument, but a question that continues to confront us, suspended in time.
