CAIRO — After an eight-year hiatus, the Cairo Biennale, one of the major international art events in the Egyptian capital, returned June 10 with a high-profile show, “Eyes East Bound,” that puts the complex identity of the Middle East under a microscope.

The 13th edition of the biennial, which will continue until August 8, showcases the works of 80 artists from 50 countries with the aim of generating “an authentic dialogue” as an alternative to the clichés of today, remarked Ehab el-Laban, the exhibition's artistic director. On the biennial's website, Laban states that this year's exhibition “extends its invitation to artists to set their compasses to the East, their eyes to an alternative Orient.”

The works displayed at three venues in central Cairo — the Gezira Art Center, Palace of Arts and the Museum of Egyptian Modern Art — exhibit great variety in media and style. Paintings by France’s Gerard Garouste, this year's guest of honor, teem with animals, real and fantastical, in unsettling scenes inspired by the Bible and Greek mythology, while Ammar al-Attar's larger-than-life photographs are strikingly modern, presenting men in white robes engaged in celebration and mourning rituals from the United Arab Emirates.

In the painting “Cycle of Illusion,” the Iraqi artist Serwan Baran depicts a standing Saddam Hussein look-alike, dressed in military dress and sinister black boots and holding a scary black dog. The Saudi artist Sarah Al-Abdali’s black-and-white ink and pencil drawings look at a first glance like traditional Islamic designs, but upon closer inspection are revealed to incorporate naked female figures.