Performative Screenings #83
Marwa Arsanios
WHO IS AFRAID OF IDEOLOGY?
Friday March 15, 2024
7 pm
This event is held in cooperation with Kunsthalle Wien in the context of the exhibition Denise Ferreira da Silva & Arjuna Neuman: Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims, curated by Andrea Popelka.
Marwa Arsanios will talk to Nour Shantout about her work between the screenings.
WHO IS AFRAID OF IDEOLOGY? is an ongoing series of films about forms of self-organization and resistance against exploitation and repression within structures of patriarchy, the state, and capitalism. The four films made so far focus in particular on the question of land distribution, highlighting its essentially political character that culminates in the struggle for “user-ship not ownership”.
The individual chapters are devoted to initiatives by women in Iraqi Kurdistan, Northern Syria, Colombia, and Lebanon fighting for collective usage of land, grassroots democracy, and right to self determination, among other things. In these contexts, a crucial role is played by the aspect of an alliance in which people come together with a common purpose. The project thus explores the potential for non-state political action that can be used to overcome existing power structures. (Søren Grammel)
MARWA ARSANIOS’ practice tackles structural questions using different devices, forms and strategies. From architectural spaces, their transformation and adaptability throughout conflict, to artist-run spaces and temporary conventions between feminist communes and cooperatives, the practice tends to make space within and parallel to existing art structures allowing experimentation with different kinds of politics. Film becomes another form and a space for connecting struggles in the way images refer to each other. In the past four years Arsanios has been attempting to think about these questions from a new materialist and a historical materialist perspective with different feminist movements that are struggling for their land. She tries to look at questions of property, law, economy and ecology from specific plots of land. The main protagonists become these lands and the people who work them. Her research includes many disciplines and is deployed in numerous collective methodologies and collaborative projects.
Arsanios was a researcher in the Fine Art Department at the Jan Van Eyck Academie, Maastricht from 2010 to 2012. She is currently a PhD candidate at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna. Solo shows include: Kunsthalle Bratislava; Heidelberger Kunstverein; Mosaic Rooms, London; Contemporary Arts Center; Cincinnati; Skuc Gallery, Ljubljana; Beirut Art Center; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Witte de With, Rotterdam; Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon; and Art in General, New York. Her films have been screened at MOMA New York; School of Art Institute Chicago; Cinéma du Réel, Paris; Rotterdam Film Festival; Film Fest, Hamburg; FID Marseille; tiff, Toronto; Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Berlin International Film Festival.
NOUR SHANTOUT is an artist, researcher and educator. She was born in Damascus, Syria in 1991, and has been based in Vienna since 2015. She is currently pursuing her doctorate of Philosophy at the Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien, where she completed her Diploma of Fine Arts (Textual Sculpture) in 2020. Her research-based project ‘Searching for the New Dress’ received the Production Award; Culture Resource, as well as The Visual Arts grant; The Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (Beirut) in 2021, and her PhD project ‘The New Dress as a Counter-Cartography of Resistance’ got awarded the DOC fellowship, from the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) in 2023. Her work centres around themes of subjugated heritage, counter-memory and history, labour and alienation, from a post-colonial feminist perspective.
