2026

Global Heshmat

Global Heshmat follows the Egyptian sculptor Hassan Heshmat (1920–2006) and his artworks in public spaces around the world. It is a team project of the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) in Berlin; I developed the website.

Heshmat was an internationally celebrated artist committed to the idea of “Art for All” (Kunst für alle). After training as a sculptor in Cairo, he travelled to Selb in Bavaria on a DAAD scholarship in 1957 to study porcelain, a medium that let him cast affordable multiples for a wide public. His monuments, reliefs and sculptures still stand in parks, museums and squares across several countries, and in 2000 he received Egypt’s State Appreciation Award.

What you can explore

The site gathers 40 works and sites, most of them in Egypt and others across Europe, the United States and China. Twenty-six are located; the other 14 are documented but not yet found. A “to be found” filter turns those gaps into an open call: visitors who recognise a Heshmat work in a public space are invited to report it.

  • Map: the works clustered by place, alongside the homes he lived in, with a dashed line tracing any work that has moved from its former site
  • Collection: 156 photographs, browsable as a gallery or a list, with a fieldbook for saving works and an export
  • People: 31 profiles from Sonja Hegasy’s research into the sponsors, curators, collectors and friends around Heshmat. Mapping them has already revealed a cluster that had gone unnoticed: his ties to the Armenian community in Cairo
  • Detail pages with images, sources and video, each with its own web address for sharing

How it’s built

Global Heshmat is a static SvelteKit site (Svelte 5 runes, TypeScript) with the map rendered by MapLibre GL JS over vector tiles. Each artwork and each person lives in its own typed data file that is discovered at build time, so adding a new entry is a one-file edit. Metadata on every page makes each work easy to share and to find in search engines, and the interface works on any screen size and from the keyboard.

Credits

Global Heshmat is a collaborative project of the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO):

  • Concept: Dr Sonja Hegasy
  • Configuration: Jan Purtzel
  • Development: Frédérick Madore
  • Contributor: Samar Heshmat

The site complements ZMO’s audiovisual exhibition on Hassan Heshmat.

Fig. 1 — The map

The 26 located works, the 14 still to be found and the places Heshmat lived. Filter by country, status or type, search works, places and people, and select a marker for its images, metadata and sources.