Materials: Salt, cornstarch, water, wood, greenhouse, hand painted resin

Under the relentless sun in Egypt’s Nile Valley, lie row upon row of bright red, freshly cut Roma tomatoes. In two weeks’ time, the tomatoes will shrink in size yet grow in importance – their market value increasing by more than twenty times that of their former freshly picked selves. Working in partnership with the sun, salt acts as an essential element in this process. Extracted from Egypt’s Mediterranean coast and spread across the open faces of the tomatoes, they pull moisture out and help preserve this delicate commodity. Vacuum-packed and shipped to supermarkets worldwide, these sun-dried tomatoes, hailed as “red gold," carry within them a complex entanglement of local tradition, foreign influence, and the shifting tides of globalization.

For her first solo exhibition in the U.S., Cairo-based artist Yasmine El Meleegy takes salt itself as her central medium to explore these tensions. Blended with water and cornstarch, the material is cast into custom molds, forming square reliefs imprinted with imagery drawn from the thriving sun-dried tomato economy. In the gallery, white tiles line the floor of a room-sized greenhouse, their delicate surfaces depicting dried tomatoes, grasshoppers, knives used for harvesting, and nightshade plants. At the gallery entrance hangs a vacuum-sealed bag of hand-painted replica tomatoes—an uncanny echo of the produce’s final commercial form.

Amid shifting political and economic forces, Red Gold serves as both a document of the present moment and a meditation on a booming market that could vanish as conditions change. Initially established in part with support from the now-dissolved USAID, the sun-dried tomato industry has provided a lucrative export market for Egypt’s agricultural industry. At the same time, this dynamic reflects challenges familiar in the U.S. and elsewhere, where small scale producers grapple with the consequences of monocropping and large-scale agribusiness—impacting working conditions, biodiversity, and traditional local agricultural practices.

The installation is an expansion of the artist’s long-term interest in the labor of food production and the politics of agriculture and illuminates the often invisible and complex forces that determine what ends up on our dinner table. Informed by research visits to Luxor and the surrounding agricultural regions where the tomatoes are produced, El Meleegy met with workers and saw first-hand the conflicting narratives around foreign aid and economic development. Her research underscores how abundance can mask precarious realities, suggesting that what we consume is never just food, but also a story of power, exchange, and survival.

Text by Danny Bracken

In conjunction with the exhibition and in partnership with Ta3amana Publishing Project the artist’s publication Red and White Gold will be available for purchase in the museum shop.