The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents Now showing: Youssef Nabil’s I saved my belly dancer, the first public presentation of the film since it entered the museum’s collection in 2025. The exhibition is centered around Nabil’s film, I saved my belly dancer (2015), which marks its 10th anniversary this year. Tahar Rahim, who resembles Nabil, embodies the artist’s alter ego, while Salma Hayek stars as the titular belly dancer. For Nabil, the dancer represents both a remembered and an imagined memory of Cairo. He states, “I wanted to talk about belly dancing as an art form that is probably unique to us [Egypt]. It’s our dance. I’ve always loved it. So, I wanted to talk about saving the idea of belly dancing in my memory, more than anything.”

This exhibition is curated by Linda Komaroff, Curator and Department Head, Art of the Middle East, LACMA.

The installation of Now showing intends to evoke the type of mid-20th-century movie theater, including retro seats, contemporaneous with the Egyptian films that inspired the works in the exhibition. The space contains a photographic portrait of the director, hand-colored by Nabil’s mentor, Van Leo, and vintage movie posters. Additionally, the exhibition features photographs, based on the film, created by Nabil’s signature practice of hand-painting on silver gelatin prints rendered dreamlike by the unearthly intensity and tonality of the color palette. This is a revival of a mid-20th century technique associated with such Cairo-based photographers as Van Leo (Levon Alexander Boyadjian (1921–2002)).

This presentation continues LACMA’s history of exploring how film and popular culture interrelate with traditional areas of art from all periods and cultures. Over the past 30 years, the museum has acquired time-based media objects in nearly every curatorial department, including Nam June Paik’s Video flag Z (1986), Matthew Barney’s Repressia (decline) (1991), Bill Viola’s Slowly turning narrative (1992), and Mariko Mori’s Miko no inori (1996), as well as works by Tacita Dean, Stan Douglas, Pierre Huyghe, Christian Marclay, Steve McQueen, Bruce Nauman, and Diana Thater.