Last year, I spoke with Hana El-Sagini for the first time — and that is when I learned about her work "Counting Fingers," dedicated to her experience of overcoming breast cancer. For that piece, she transformed the exhibition space into a hospital ward: a ceramic aquarium, a keyboard with nipples instead of keys, a patient chair shaped like breast ducts — all created to process what she had been through. It was a conversation about a body that stops belonging to you, about losing your hair, about becoming what she called a "hybrid being."

This year, Hana returns with a new work — and this time at Art Basel (June 18–21, 2026, in the Statements sector, presented by Gypsum Gallery), marking her debut at the main fair. Plot Twist is a bronze sculpture, 3.5 meters high and spanning about 6 meters, growing from a corner of the booth like a braid made of three strands — at once hair, nerves, roots, and a meditation on resilience as something collective, subtle, and anti-heroic.

What is striking is her approach to the bronze itself: rather than treating it as the monumental, heroic material it is traditionally known for, Hana pushed it to its limits, muting it, thinning it, making it fragile — turning a material built for permanence into something vulnerable.

— Hana, Plot Twist is visually striking, but its meaning is deeply rooted in your personal experiences. Drawing on experiences of illness, physical challenge, and transformation, the work ultimately reflects on resilience — not only as an individual experience, but as a collective one. My first question is: Why did you choose the name Plot Twist for this work?

— Plot Twist comes from the idea that life is happening, and then something happens. Suddenly, the plot you thought you were following completely changes because of one event — trauma, for example, or something else.

The term comes from movies, of course. Plot twists make a movie interesting, but at the same time, they confuse everyone and push them to change direction.

There is also a double meaning because the work looks somewhat botanical, and there is a lot of twisting happening. The braid gets twisted, and “plot” can also mean a plot of land. So there is this duality between the plot of a story and the plot of land, both being twisted in a way.

— There is also the idea of hair in the work, right?

— Yeah, there is. Actually, it comes from hair, it comes from the nervous system, and it comes from how the inside of the body looks. So it is not only about hair as a perfect braid; it is also about this act of care, and about how resilience looks to me.

— What does resilience look like to you?

— It is a very complex thing. Real resilience is very anti-heroic — it is subtle, it happens in the background. Other people notice it, but often not the person who is actually going through it.

I never thought of myself as a resilient person. I just had a goal and wanted to achieve it.

As a child, I wanted to be a good basketball player. I loved the game. I didn't want to sit on the bench — I just wanted to play. But I was born with a condition called Erb’s palsy. It happens when a child is pulled very strongly by the arm during birth, which stretches the nerves of the entire arm. My right arm is very weak.

But what do I do? I worked incredibly hard on my three-point shots. I worked hard on reading the game and becoming a strong team player.

Eventually, I made it to the national team, and I became an MVP. In my final year of playing, I was Egypt's MVP. At that point, I felt I had reached that level with what was essentially a 60 or 80 per cent arm. That is how I have approached everything in my life.

Then, when I was diagnosed with breast cancer, I didn't comprehend at the time the length of the process, and it is not only about the illness itself and the betrayal of your own body. It is also about what comes afterwards: how you see yourself differently, how your body changes physically. The brutal amputations that happen: the loss of a breast, the loss of hair. These are difficult things to accept and talk about.

All these experiences made me look very deeply inside my body. I kept asking: What is happening? How can I make it better? How can I adapt?

There was a lot of resilience in my body just to keep it functioning. Not to become a "normal" person, but to function in the way I needed to function.

I began to see Plot Twist as a project about resilience. What does resilience actually mean? Not only my personal resilience, but collective resilience — the resilience of families going through difficult experiences, the death of a loved one, wars, revolutions. How do we continue to grow together through hardship?

I don't think of resilience as something heroic. Surviving and moving through difficult experiences is not a heroic act. It is the opposite. It is extremely subtle. It is about consistency. It is about failing and coming back. It is about finding people you can hold onto, people who can help give you strength.

— Why braid?

— A braid is made of three very weak strands that become strong when woven together, right? How do people or circumstances come together to create strength? And when one strand fails, how do the others continue and build something on their own?

That is really the story behind Plot Twist. It is this braided form erupting from a corner and slowly taking over space in a very subtle way.

— The sculpture resists being identified as one thing. It can look like hair, roots, nerves, vines, or even a social structure. Was that ambiguity important to you?

— Very much so. I was interested in creating a form that sits between categories. The work draws from anatomy, botany, and human relationships simultaneously. I wanted viewers to move between these readings rather than settle on a single interpretation.

— Why did you choose bronze as a material?

— Bronze is usually associated with monuments and heroes, but I wanted to use it for something completely different. That is also why the production was so challenging, because the material isn’t helping. It is used to create mass, to act as a hero, to make statues and monuments. And I am using it in the opposite way — in a very fragile and vulnerable way.

I pushed the medium very hard. It kept failing me, and I kept saying, I am going to do it in bronze. I don't care how many times it breaks — I'll mend it and work on it again.

Because bronze allowed me to make the forms so thin, I started untangling the braids and opening them up. I wanted them to feel strange, more like nerves. I wanted the strands to separate and reconnect, to carry different stories — three strands moving apart and then finding their way back together again. That movement between separation and reconnection became a formal expression of resilience itself.

I worked very closely with the foundry that produced it to immerse myself in the process and understand the medium. It is the same foundry that cast my grandfather's work, so we go a very long way back. We really worked as a team. I spent almost two months there, every day.

Everything actually started with clay. I insisted on beginning in ceramics because I needed the work to start from a place of flesh, vulnerability, and earth.

I made the entire sculpture in clay, bisque-fired it, shipped it from my studio in Dubai to Cairo, and then had it cast there. It would have been much easier and much cheaper to make it directly in wax. Then there would have been no need for double mollds, no shipping, no firing, no travelling, none of the complicated processes, but this process was essential for me and the work.

From clay, it goes through all these transformations: firing, firing again, changing mediums, becoming something else. Because that is what resilience is. It is not a fixed state; it is a process.

— What about the colour of the sculpture?

— It is muted grey. I used a grey patina that feels intentionally unprecious. It reinforces the idea of the work as anti-monumental and anti-heroic. Bronze is a very expensive material, and artists often want to emphasise its preciousness. They use traditional patinas that highlight its beauty and value.

I wanted the opposite. I muted the bronze. I was interested in whether a material historically associated with power, permanence, and heroism could instead communicate vulnerability, care, and interdependence.

— How big is Plot Twist?

— It extends all the way to the end of the booth. It is 3.5 meters high and spans about 6 meters across. From the corner, it reaches roughly 3.5 meters in one direction and 2.5 meters in the other.

— Why does the sculpture grow from the corner rather than stand independently in the space?

— I was interested in growth rather than occupation. Monuments typically claim the centre of a space. Plot Twist begins from a marginal position and slowly expands outward, almost like a living system finding its way through an environment.

— This is your first time at Art Basel. How does that feel?

— It is my first fair ever, and I am genuinely humbled by the whole experience because what happened was quite unusual.

Gypsum was always the gallery I wanted to work with. I knew Aleya Hamza, the owner, and we had spoken about my practice over the years. We were planning a solo exhibition for next year when, one day, she called me and said she wanted to take me to Art Basel Statements.

Was I shocked? Absolutely. I never saw it coming. In my mind, that was something that might happen three or four years down the line. She had never shown my work before. So it is such a humbling leap of faith in me and my work.

— After everything you have described, what do you hope visitors encounter when they stand in front of Plot Twist?

— I hope people recognise something of themselves in it. Not necessarily my story, but their own experiences of adaptation, support, loss, care, and growth. The work is ultimately less about surviving adversity than about how we continue to evolve through it.