Monuments & Flowers
Curated by Regine Basha
Monuments & Flowers brings together a selection of seminal video work by women artists culled from the archives of ArteEast with the work of contemporary voices including Yto Barrada, Lara Baladi, Marianne Fahmy, Malak Helmy Maha Maamoun and Setareh Shahbazi with Mirene Arsanios.
How do we reflect upon the ebb and flow of destruction and construction, death and regeneration – of cities, of ideologies, of nations and particularly of quotidian life and ecosystems? As these overwhelming tragedies accelerate in real time in different parts of the world, the act of memorializing is overpowered by a continual state of grieving. How do artists and filmmakers create works of memorialization through this lens of grieving? Oftentimes it is through invoking both past and future perspectives into alternate visions of reality that speak to hidden truths. Monument & Flowers reflected on these strategies in its original iteration in 2019, and will now be re-mounted in Europe at this time with an all women line-up and the addition of Spanish subtitles, courtesy of ArteEast and Casa Arabe.
Monuments & Flowers features films by six visionary women artists from the region termed ´the Middle East´ where a colonialists´ footprint of destruction, displacement and reconstruction have long become part of artists´ psychic imagination and generative narratives. The film and video works selected here internalize this state of constant flux, employing both fictional and diaristic narratives while collapsing the hyper-real with the surreal. Scenes from daily life may become infused with a subconscious overlay of desire, fear, alienation or utopian longings that resemble a hallucination of the past and future colliding. Through highly evocative mixed use of time-based media; ranging from found super 8mm, to stained celluloid, to CGI, many of the works lean towards a retro-futurist lens that is highly attentive to the minutiae and habits of locale, yet slippery in its chronology.
Regine Basha is a curator, educator and cultural producer working between Madrid and New York. Her curatorial work and story-telling archive, Tuning Baghdad, can be found on bashaprojects.com. She is based between Brooklyn and Madrid.
Monuments and Flowers is co-presented by ArteEast and Casa Árabe. This series is part of the legacy program Unpacking the ArteArchive, which preserves and presents over 17 years of film and video programming by ArteEast. In addition to in-person, theatrical screenings at Casa Árabe Cordoba (April 27th, 7pm) and at Casa Árabe Madrid (April 28, 7:30pm), the series will be presented on artearchive.org from April 29 - May 7, 2022. For more info on the in person program go to casaarabe.es
Check out the Artist Spotlights with Lara Baladi, Setareh Shahbazi , Marianne Fahmy, and Malak Helmy
Domestic Tourism II
Relying exclusively on footage from Egyptian films that use the pyramids as backdrop, Domestic Tourism II explores the ways in which these iconic historical monuments can be re-appropriated from the “timelessness” of the tourist postcard and reinscribed by the political, social, and historical complexity of their urban landscape.
About the Filmmaker
Maha Maamoun is an artist, curator, and independent publisher. Her work examines the form, function, and currency of common visual and literary images as an entry point to investigating the cultural fabric that we weave and are woven into. She is a founding board member of the Contemporary Image Collective (CiC), co-founder of the independent publishing platform Kayfa, and member of the curatorial team of Forum Expanded at Berlinale.
Maamoun holds a BA in Economics and MA in Middle Eastern History from the American University in Cairo (AUC).
Her artistic practice was shown in exhibitions and biennials including: Constructing the world: Art and economy 1919-1939 and 2008-2018 – Kunsthalle Mannheim; Strange Days: Memories of the Future – Store X and New Museum; The Time is Out of Joint – Sharjah Art Foundation; Century of Centuries – SALT; Like Milking a Stone – Rosa Santos Gallery; The Night of Counting the Years – Fridricianum; Here and Elsewhere – New Museum; Ten Thousand Wiles and a Hundred Thousand Tricks – Meeting Points 7; Forum Expanded – Berlinale 64; Transmediale; Objects in Mirror are Closer than they Appear, Tate Modern; 9th Gwangju Biennale; Momentarily Learning from Mega Events, Makan, Amman; Second World: Where is Progress Progressing, Steirischer Herbst; The End of Money, Witte de With; Sharjah Biennial 10; Mapping Subjectivity, MoMA; Live Cinema, Philadelphia Museum of Art; Ground Floor America, Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art; The Future of Tradition/The Tradition of Future, Haus Der Kunst.
Her curatorial work includes the exhibitions How to reappear: Through the quivering leaves of independent publishing (BAC, Beirut & MMAG, Amman); How to maneuver: Shape-shifting texts and other publishing tactics (Warehouse421, Abu Dhabi); In light of the land and in its shadows (Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht); Assembled in Streams of Synonyms (Sharjah Gallery, Cairo); PhotoCairo3 (CiC & Townhouse, Cairo).
—
- Year2009
- Runtime62 minutes
- LanguageArabic
- CountryEgypt
- DirectorMaha Maamoun
- FilmmakerMaha Maamoun
Monuments & Flowers
Curated by Regine Basha
Monuments & Flowers brings together a selection of seminal video work by women artists culled from the archives of ArteEast with the work of contemporary voices including Yto Barrada, Lara Baladi, Marianne Fahmy, Malak Helmy Maha Maamoun and Setareh Shahbazi with Mirene Arsanios.
How do we reflect upon the ebb and flow of destruction and construction, death and regeneration – of cities, of ideologies, of nations and particularly of quotidian life and ecosystems? As these overwhelming tragedies accelerate in real time in different parts of the world, the act of memorializing is overpowered by a continual state of grieving. How do artists and filmmakers create works of memorialization through this lens of grieving? Oftentimes it is through invoking both past and future perspectives into alternate visions of reality that speak to hidden truths. Monument & Flowers reflected on these strategies in its original iteration in 2019, and will now be re-mounted in Europe at this time with an all women line-up and the addition of Spanish subtitles, courtesy of ArteEast and Casa Arabe.
Monuments & Flowers features films by six visionary women artists from the region termed ´the Middle East´ where a colonialists´ footprint of destruction, displacement and reconstruction have long become part of artists´ psychic imagination and generative narratives. The film and video works selected here internalize this state of constant flux, employing both fictional and diaristic narratives while collapsing the hyper-real with the surreal. Scenes from daily life may become infused with a subconscious overlay of desire, fear, alienation or utopian longings that resemble a hallucination of the past and future colliding. Through highly evocative mixed use of time-based media; ranging from found super 8mm, to stained celluloid, to CGI, many of the works lean towards a retro-futurist lens that is highly attentive to the minutiae and habits of locale, yet slippery in its chronology.
Regine Basha is a curator, educator and cultural producer working between Madrid and New York. Her curatorial work and story-telling archive, Tuning Baghdad, can be found on bashaprojects.com. She is based between Brooklyn and Madrid.
Monuments and Flowers is co-presented by ArteEast and Casa Árabe. This series is part of the legacy program Unpacking the ArteArchive, which preserves and presents over 17 years of film and video programming by ArteEast. In addition to in-person, theatrical screenings at Casa Árabe Cordoba (April 27th, 7pm) and at Casa Árabe Madrid (April 28, 7:30pm), the series will be presented on artearchive.org from April 29 - May 7, 2022. For more info on the in person program go to casaarabe.es
Check out the Artist Spotlights with Lara Baladi, Setareh Shahbazi , Marianne Fahmy, and Malak Helmy
Domestic Tourism II
Relying exclusively on footage from Egyptian films that use the pyramids as backdrop, Domestic Tourism II explores the ways in which these iconic historical monuments can be re-appropriated from the “timelessness” of the tourist postcard and reinscribed by the political, social, and historical complexity of their urban landscape.
About the Filmmaker
Maha Maamoun is an artist, curator, and independent publisher. Her work examines the form, function, and currency of common visual and literary images as an entry point to investigating the cultural fabric that we weave and are woven into. She is a founding board member of the Contemporary Image Collective (CiC), co-founder of the independent publishing platform Kayfa, and member of the curatorial team of Forum Expanded at Berlinale.
Maamoun holds a BA in Economics and MA in Middle Eastern History from the American University in Cairo (AUC).
Her artistic practice was shown in exhibitions and biennials including: Constructing the world: Art and economy 1919-1939 and 2008-2018 – Kunsthalle Mannheim; Strange Days: Memories of the Future – Store X and New Museum; The Time is Out of Joint – Sharjah Art Foundation; Century of Centuries – SALT; Like Milking a Stone – Rosa Santos Gallery; The Night of Counting the Years – Fridricianum; Here and Elsewhere – New Museum; Ten Thousand Wiles and a Hundred Thousand Tricks – Meeting Points 7; Forum Expanded – Berlinale 64; Transmediale; Objects in Mirror are Closer than they Appear, Tate Modern; 9th Gwangju Biennale; Momentarily Learning from Mega Events, Makan, Amman; Second World: Where is Progress Progressing, Steirischer Herbst; The End of Money, Witte de With; Sharjah Biennial 10; Mapping Subjectivity, MoMA; Live Cinema, Philadelphia Museum of Art; Ground Floor America, Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art; The Future of Tradition/The Tradition of Future, Haus Der Kunst.
Her curatorial work includes the exhibitions How to reappear: Through the quivering leaves of independent publishing (BAC, Beirut & MMAG, Amman); How to maneuver: Shape-shifting texts and other publishing tactics (Warehouse421, Abu Dhabi); In light of the land and in its shadows (Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht); Assembled in Streams of Synonyms (Sharjah Gallery, Cairo); PhotoCairo3 (CiC & Townhouse, Cairo).
—
- Year2009
- Runtime62 minutes
- LanguageArabic
- CountryEgypt
- DirectorMaha Maamoun
- FilmmakerMaha Maamoun