Looking backwards through time, Arsanios provides a historical survey on how land has been divided and used in Lebanon. From the formation of the land, to the contemporary moment, personal histories are intertwined with speculative fiction to think about different ways of interacting with the commons; and in ways that are multi-species, defying separation between the human and the non-human. Rocks become sentient through the use of 3D rendering software, providing a view of history literally from the ground up. This work continues Arsanios’ research into land rights, this time using the frameworks of post-humanism and ecology to imagine new potentialities towards how we understand land and capital.

~ Myriam Mouflih

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)