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
What Things May Come
After the great flood of the delta, a future oceanographer tells the story of the people's relocation to the confidential camps in the Sahara desert.
About the Filmmaker
Born in 1992, Marianne Fahmy lives and works in Alexandria, Egypt. She earned her BA in Painting from Alexandria University, Egypt. She studied at Mass Alexandria independent art program in 2016.
Fahmy works with installation and film. Her focus is on undocumented histories related to people, architecture, and language. Her current work revolves around the history of water, where she finds possibilities for creative additions, that transform prescribed conventional narratives into a boundless by time artwork. In conversation with scientists and urban planners, she adds believability to the fabricated narratives she creates, where she combines science, historical events, and myths to imagine a future society to come.
Her work was part of 7th Yokohama triennial in Japan, the 13th Havana Biennale in 2019, Dakar Biennale in 2018, and Manifesta 13th in 2020. Her films has screened at Nurnberg Contemporary Art Museum, Museum für Neue Kunst, Freiburg, Germany, Contemporary Image Collective, Cairo, Postmasters Gallery, New York, and the Museum of Ljubljana, Slovenia.
- Year2019
- Runtime12 minutes
- LanguageEnglish, arabic
- CountryEgypt
- DirectorMarianne Fahmy
- Executive ProducerMorphadat
- MusicTarek Hussein
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
What Things May Come
After the great flood of the delta, a future oceanographer tells the story of the people's relocation to the confidential camps in the Sahara desert.
About the Filmmaker
Born in 1992, Marianne Fahmy lives and works in Alexandria, Egypt. She earned her BA in Painting from Alexandria University, Egypt. She studied at Mass Alexandria independent art program in 2016.
Fahmy works with installation and film. Her focus is on undocumented histories related to people, architecture, and language. Her current work revolves around the history of water, where she finds possibilities for creative additions, that transform prescribed conventional narratives into a boundless by time artwork. In conversation with scientists and urban planners, she adds believability to the fabricated narratives she creates, where she combines science, historical events, and myths to imagine a future society to come.
Her work was part of 7th Yokohama triennial in Japan, the 13th Havana Biennale in 2019, Dakar Biennale in 2018, and Manifesta 13th in 2020. Her films has screened at Nurnberg Contemporary Art Museum, Museum für Neue Kunst, Freiburg, Germany, Contemporary Image Collective, Cairo, Postmasters Gallery, New York, and the Museum of Ljubljana, Slovenia.
- Year2019
- Runtime12 minutes
- LanguageEnglish, arabic
- CountryEgypt
- DirectorMarianne Fahmy
- Executive ProducerMorphadat
- MusicTarek Hussein