This paper looks at resistance to the art salon, concentrating on the historical avant-garde in Egypt and its reaction to the salon and academic art in general. The focus will be on the Art and Freedom group, which was close to surrealism and its leading figure André Breton, and the group’s exhibition practices. Their alternative, independent exhibitions went against established tastes and models of perception, and provoked in many ways. The group wanted to challenge the prevalent bourgeois reception and production of art, the homogenization of public taste as well as the aesthetic reception of art. The museum and sacral aura of the dominant exhibition concepts were to be undermined and desacralized. The surrealists’ aim was to erode the art institution that contributed to a consolidation of power, and return to a spiritual experience of art. This experience was to go beyond a simple observation of beauty, and bring the unfinished and raw aspects of a work of art to the foreground. Exhibiting in unfinished buildings or – as in contemporary art – industrial buildings was part of this experience, but also the use and détournement of objects. The use of new media (apart from painting and sculpture), the interest in so-called primitive art, and the development of a new aesthetic repertoire that was to defy the established norms and a Eurocentristic point of view vis-à-vis the classification of art, was characteristic for the surrealists. This resulted in alternative exhibition formats that aimed at a "Gesamtkunstwerk" trying to go beyond mere visual aspects. Taking the salon and the art academy as a starting point, this paper will sketch out the debates around taste, values and morals and the resistance against established norms by the Egyptian avant-garde. At the same time the migration of these "counter-exhibitions" or manifestations that first took place in Paris and London and their implementation in Egypt will be looked at.