Two temporary exhibitions in and there’s a formula developing at the Young V&A. Which is absolutely fine, because it’s a good formula.
Like predecessor Japan: Myth to Manga, new opening Making Egypt combines clear, lucid historical and cultural storytelling with an intriguing collection of historic artefacts set alongside modern pop cultural items influenced by them.
Making Egypt is, naturally, concerned with Ancient Egypt, and over its three rooms the title is interpreted in three quite different ways. Wildest is the first room, which goes all in on the colourful and often contradictory world of their gods – a short recorded audio drama has them bickering over who literally made the world. The second room is more concerned with Egyptian writing, hieroglyphics and style, while the third covers buildings and statues – if you don’t leave it as an expert on the making of faience (a sort of turquoise ceramic that was huge 5,000 years ago) then you haven’t been paying attention.
The ravishing painted wooden sarcophagus of Princess Sopdet-em-haawt is the obvious showstopper
The mixing of contemporary objects with the ancient stuff is perhaps less effective than in Myth to Manga. In part, that’s because there’s far less cultural continuity between Ancient and modern Egypt than mediaeval and contemporary Japan. But the fact much of the modern stuff on display – be that a clip of the Brendan Fraser popcorn classic The Mummy, or a Games Workshop ‘Necrosphinx’ – has an orientalist dimension is something this tween-orientated exhibition understandably doesn’t have time to unpack. The ethically complicated relationship between Ancient Egypt and the contemporary West is largely unexplored, but what child doesn’t love a Necrosphinx?
There’s a bit of nice interactive stuff, and the written text is crisp and engaging - you should come out with a working knowledge of the arcana of both Egyptian pottery and the Egyptian pantheon – but the real magic comes from the artefacts themselves. It is consistently staggering to get up close to a succession of genuinely beautiful objects that for the most part predate the Roman Empire, sometimes by thousands of years.
Uncannily preserved by the desert sands, the ravishing painted wooden sarcophagus of Princess Sopdet-em-haawt is the obvious showstopper, closely followed by the beautifully coloured 4,000-year old funerary boat. But there are many, many impressive objects, from jewellery to vases that look like they could have been made yesterday, but are in fact almost unimaginably old in human terms.
It’s cool that elements of the Ancient Egyptian aesthetic remain recognisable and even influential millennia later. But the modern stuff here is essentially just a bit of fun – it’s the ancient objects that’ll blow your mind.
