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Marwa Arsanios is an artist, filmmaker, and researcher who reconsiders mid-twentieth-century politics from a contemporary perspective. Her collaborative, interdisciplinary research practice often focuses on gender relations, collectivism, urbanism and industrialization. In recent years, Arsanios has been attempting to think with a feminist, new materialist and a historical materialist lens – looking at questions of property, law, economy and ecology from specific plots of land; to the extent that the main protagonists of the work become the lands themselves and the people who work them.
Her films have screeded widely, including at Cinéma du Réel, Rotterdam Film Festival, Film Fest Hamburg, and Berlin International Film Festival. Solo exhibitions have included: Skuc Gallery Ljubljana, Beirut Art Center, Hammer Museum Los Angeles, and Witte de With Rotterdam. Group exhibitions have included: Documenta 15, 11th Berlin Biennale, Gwangju Biennial, Lülea Biennial, and SF Moma, San Francisco.
I’ve Heard Stories (2008), I’ve Heard 3 Stories (2009), Have You Ever Killed a Bear or Becoming Jamila (2014), Learning to Dance (2015), Falling is not collapsing falling is extending (2016), Amateurs Stars and Extras or the labor of love (2018), Who is Afraid of Ideology? Part1&2 (2017/2019), Who is Afraid of Ideology? Part3 (2020), Who is Afraid of Ideology? part 4 Reverse shot (2022)
A programme of short works traversing hallucinatory dreamscapes, contested landscapes, and the precarious movements of bodies through time and space. Argentinian auteur Lucrecia Martel screens alongside contemporary artists, Basim Magdy, Marwa Arsanios and Fox Maxy.
This programme brings together Marwa Arsanios’ new work Amateurs, Stars and Extras or the labor of love with her earlier, much-lauded film Have You Ever Killed a Bear or Becoming Jamila.
Q&A with filmmaker Marwa Arsanios
Marwa Arsanios’ Who Is Afraid of Ideology? focuses on ecology, feminism, social organization, nation-building, war and economic struggle. In its formal construction, the film lays bare some of the documentary form’s devices to create a record of shared living and organising— voiced by those within, and in proximity to, the communities documented. Arsanios presents us with two radical women’s movements and their means of survival as a possible solution to the degradation of the commons and the destruction of the earth.
Q&A with Marwa Arsanios
