Mohamed Ismail Shawki (Ismail) is a Cairo-based visual artist whose practice operates at the intersection of art, activism, and public space. A graduate of Egypt’s High Institute of Cinema and co-founder of the street-art collective Mona Lisa Brigades, he works primarily with sculpture, installation, and site-specific interventions to examine how urban environments shape social behavior, visibility, and control.

His work recontextualizes everyday infrastructural objects—such as street barriers, concrete blocks, and security devices—using humor, exaggeration, and material transformation to reveal the often-invisible mechanisms of authoritarian planning, systemic neglect, and social discipline embedded in the cityscape. Through subtle shifts in scale, function, and placement, these objects become speculative tools that question who public space is designed for and whose bodies are excluded or regulated.

Grounded in long-term research and collaborative processes, Ismail frequently engages with local communities,and residents whose experiences are typically marginalized within official urban narratives. His interventions function as temporary disruptions within the city, inviting passersby into moments of reflection, participation, and quiet resistance. By embedding artistic gestures into everyday routines, he seeks to open spaces for dialogue around agency, care, and collective imagination.

Across projects developed between Cairo and other international contexts, his practice investigates how architectures of control migrate across geographies, and how citizens adapt, resist, or re-appropriate them. Ultimately, Ismail’s work proposes public space as a contested yet fertile terrain—one where artistic experimentation can expose power relations while fostering alternative visions for coexistence, dignity, and civic life.