Egypt Angered at Artists' Use of Nefertiti Bust

For more than eight decades, the serenely beautiful likeness of Queen Nefertiti's head has been the most celebrated exhibit in Berlin's Egyptian Museum, attracting thousands of visitors and resisting all attempts at repatriation.

But a conceptual artwork involving the 3,300-year-old limestone bust and the body of a scantily clad woman has provoked outrage in the queen's homeland and the accusation that Nefertiti is no longer safe in Germany.

The artwork is the brainchild of a Hungarian duo called Little Warsaw, and involved lowering the head of Nefertiti on to the headless bronze statue of a woman wearing a tight-fitting transparent robe.

A documentary of the encounter, together with the headless statue, will be the official Hungarian contribution to the Venice Biennale, which opens this weekend.

The Berlin museum's director, Dieter Wildung, defended it as "a homage to Nefertiti by means of contemporary art", but in Cairo the artwork is regarded as a calculated insult to Egypt's heritage and Islamic morals. "We don't agree with this, that the head of Queen Nefertiti should be subjected to an experiment by unknown artists, and could possibly be put in danger," Mohamed al-Orabi, the Egyptian envoy to Berlin, said yesterday.

"In Egypt, people are very upset. The head is a national treasure."

In Cairo, where censors remove pictures of naked bodies from imported foreign publications, there have been scandalized headlines about "Queen Nefertiti naked in a Berlin museum", while there have been jokes in the German press about "prudish Egypt".

But this is not just a clash over views of art or the representation of the female form, but over the attitude towards Nefertiti's bust itself. In Berlin, the queen is affectionately dubbed "Nofi" and her face features on postcards of the city, but in Egypt she is venerated.

The Egyptian culture minister, Faruq Hosni, has condemned the artists' actions as "unethical" and asked the foreign minister to make a formal protest.