The construction of histories of modern art from the Southwest Asia/North Africa region (the “Middle East”) often includes theorizations of a broken, nonlinear sense of time and questions related to the reconstitution of an intact chronology. The resonance of this mode of viewing the past can be detected in a historiographical reading of modern art history in Egypt, in particular. As scholars like Omar Kholief and Dina Ramadan have touched upon, writing a modern Egyptian art history is complicated both by the absence of an organized archive in the field of Egyptian modern art (described by Kholief in “Tracing Routes: Debating Modernism, Mapping the Contemporary,” in Imperfect Chronology: Arab Art from the Modern to the Contemporary: Works from the Barjeel Art Foundation, ed. Omar Kholeif with Candy Stobbs (London: Whitechapel Gallery and Munich, London, and New York: Prestel Verlag, 2015), 17) and, respectively, by the dialectics present in the history of art writing within Egypt itself (outlined by Ramadan in “Cultivating Taste, Creating the Modern Subject: Sawt el-Fannan and Art Criticism in 1950s Egypt,” Middle East Studies Association Bulletin 42, no. 1/2 (Summer/Winter 2008): 30, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23063539). My research focuses on modern art in Egypt in the era after WWII, a time in which instability, decolonial revolution, and new conceptions of nationalist imperatives reshaped life within the newly independent Egyptian nation. Under these circumstances, I ask: how might we use artworks themselves as documents to understand how artists conceptualized time during this period in which chronology “broke”? In this paper I examine artworks by Hamed Owais, Tahia Halim, and Inji Efflatoun in order to chart how artists envisioned the future (as in Owais’s mechanically rendered, Mexican-muralist-inspired At the Aswan Dam); how they documented the realities of the revolution (such as, for instance, in Halim’s In the Old Nubia Town, which depicts a village about to be destroyed by the state project of the Aswan High Dam); and how they attempted to look beyond, into the timeless and universal associated with abstraction (as Efflatoun does through her shimmering technique dubbed “white light,” which she employed to evoke the particular quality of the Egyptian landscape). I propose that a close reading of the work of these artists gives new insight into the lived experience of the temporal shifts which we view in retrospect as the fracturing of chronology.