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
In Arabic, Habaa2 is the term used to describe the moment when individual particles of dust become visible to the naked eye. Habaa2’s translation into English renders these four words: Dust; Aerosol; Chaos; Vanity. The video explores a series of events in Cairo in the summer of 2009.
About the Filmmaker
Malak Helmy (b. Alexandria, Egypt, 1982) is based in Cairo, and her art focuses on video, text-based works, and collective initiatives. Much of Helmy’s video work visually references the new cultural and architectural constructs of her native Egypt, disputing their too-easy claim on reality and seeking a truer center for psychical meaning. The rhythm of her videos emulates that of desire, but the pathos of the work is of desire left waiting, as time—and its trappings of expectation, language, will—is suspended. With this deft poetry, Helmy’s video art succinctly and beautifully encapsulates the haunting liminality that defines this historical moment, in Egypt and everywhere.
- Year2009
- Runtime6 minutes
- LanguageEnglish
- CountryEgypt
- DirectorMalak Helmy
- ScreenwriterMalak Helmy
- FilmmakerMalak Helmy
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
In Arabic, Habaa2 is the term used to describe the moment when individual particles of dust become visible to the naked eye. Habaa2’s translation into English renders these four words: Dust; Aerosol; Chaos; Vanity. The video explores a series of events in Cairo in the summer of 2009.
About the Filmmaker
Malak Helmy (b. Alexandria, Egypt, 1982) is based in Cairo, and her art focuses on video, text-based works, and collective initiatives. Much of Helmy’s video work visually references the new cultural and architectural constructs of her native Egypt, disputing their too-easy claim on reality and seeking a truer center for psychical meaning. The rhythm of her videos emulates that of desire, but the pathos of the work is of desire left waiting, as time—and its trappings of expectation, language, will—is suspended. With this deft poetry, Helmy’s video art succinctly and beautifully encapsulates the haunting liminality that defines this historical moment, in Egypt and everywhere.
- Year2009
- Runtime6 minutes
- LanguageEnglish
- CountryEgypt
- DirectorMalak Helmy
- ScreenwriterMalak Helmy
- FilmmakerMalak Helmy