Double Fantasy: Learning, Living and Loving with Ibrahim Massouda: A Surrealist Egyptian Story?

This opening book chapter in English and Portugese sets the tone for the first ever exhibition of the late Egyptian-Brazilian-Italian artist, Ibrahim Massouda/Alberto Massuda held at the Oscar Niemeyer Museum, Curitiba, Brazil. Published by the Oscar Niemeyer Museum in Spring 2026, edited by award-winning Brazilian critic, curator and scholar, Fernando Bini. The essay seeks to reconcile the two lives of Ibrahim Massouda, a figure associated with the Egyptian Surrealist movement who was assumed to have died in the Jewish exodus from Egypt at some point in the 1950s and 60s. The author's positioning of the artist in a historic group exhibition, 'In the Heart of Another Country' in 2022 and 2023, shed new light onto artist and brought new attention, revealing the artist's new identity as Alberto Massuda. In exile, the Jewish Egyptian artist had lived in exile as Alberto Massuda first in Italy before making Brazil his home, where he had become a celebrated national treasure. This essay seeks to reconcile these two parallel histories of absence, loss and the diasporic imagination on the occasion of what would have been the artist's centenary.