Join us for a screening of Marwa Arsanios’s Who Is Afraid of Ideology, Part 4 Reverse Shot (2022) followed by a conversation with the artist.
For several years, filmmaker Marwa Arsanios has been exploring the impact of war on our relationship with nature, by observing eco-feminist practices in conflict zones.
Part four of Arsanios’s film series Who Is Afraid of Ideology? follows a collaborative project attempting to shift the status of a private plot of land in the North of Lebanon to a common waqf: an endowment to benefit and support communities and aid community development. The aim is to advance the right of usership over ownership, allowing the land to be used only by people for non-agricultural purposes. Reflecting the way that land as a living object inherently resists property, the film explores the interconnectedness of geology, history, law and agriculture, bringing forward a kind of ecology of thought whose purpose is communalisation and rehabilitation.
The film duration is 35 minutes. A Q&A between Marwa Arsanios and Spike Island curator Carmen Juliá follows the screening.
MARWA ARSANIOS
Marwa Arsanios’s practice tackles structural and infrastructural questions using different devices, forms and strategies. Her practice tends to make space within and parallel to existing art structures – from architectural spaces, and their transformation and adaptability throughout conflict, to artist-run spaces and temporary conventions between feminist communes and cooperatives – allowing experimentation with different kinds of politics. For Arsanios, film is a form and a space for connecting struggles in the way that images refer to other images. She considers questions of property, law, economy and ecology through specific plots of land, and attempts to think these questions from a new materialist and a historical materialist perspective through different feminist movements that are struggling for their land.
Arsanios has exhibited widely and recent solo exhibitions include: The Mosaic Rooms, London (2022); Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (2021); Skuc Gallery, Ljubljana (2018); and Beirut Art Center (2017). Selected group exhibitions include Documenta 15 (2022), Mardin biennial (2022); Sydney Biennial film program (2022); 3rd Autostrada Biennale, Pristina (2021); 11th Berlin Biennale (2020); The Renaissance Society, Chicago (2020); Gwangju Biennial (2018); SF MoMA, San Francisco (2019); 14th Sharjah Biennale (2019); Maxxi Museum, Rome (2017); New Museum, New York (2014); and 55th Venice Biennial (2013).
