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
ANTEDOOM
ANTEDOOM translates the unrepresentable brutality of our daily newsfeeds into an artistic language that peels away from single occurrences and describes a specific feeling of strain compared to the anxious moment before a medical diagnosis is announced.
Derived from the term Anteroom – a small outer room used as a waiting room for medical inspections – ANTEDOOM refers to voyeuristic approaches to bodies, vulnerabilities and physical trauma, and in a broader sense to transparent bodies in connection to machines that have the ability to look through us. In their use within medical treatment as well as their everyday deployment at border inspections and other contemporary forms of surveillance and wide-ranging data-collection.
About the Filmmaker
Setareh Shahbazi compiles and transforms micro-narratives through conversations, collaborations, visual notes and found photographs: images from public archives and private collections, snapshots, film stills, newspapers, social media and daily newsfeeds. With a playful irreverence to the sanctity of a photograph as a mirror of reality, she drains details out of images. In trying to make sense of their broken narratives, their impossible translations into different contexts, temporalities and languages, she is constantly shifting perspectives to allow these observations to come together in a fictional afterlife. Setareh Shahbazi studied Scenography, Visual Art and Media Theory at Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design and spent the following years living and working between Beirut, Tehran, Cairo and Berlin, where she is currently based. Her work has been shown in solo shows at Tarahane Azad, Tehran; Gypsum Gallery, Cairo; 98weeks Project Space, Beirut; Contemporary Arts Forum, Santa Barbara; Galerie Sfeir-Semler, Hamburg; Montgomery, Berlin and at Karlsruher Kunstverein. She has participated in international group shows, including nbk, Berlin; Depo, Istanbul; 17 Essex, NY; Nottingham Comtemporary, UK; Sharjah Biennial 13; UAE; Kadist Art Foundation, Paris; Kunsthaus Wien; Beirut Art Center, Lebanon; Asar Gallery, Tehran; Program, Berlin; Kunstverein Frankfurt; Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut; HKW, Berlin; Fondation Cartier, Paris and Rooseum, Malmö.
Mirene Arsenios (Writing and Voice)
Mirene Arsanios is the author of the short story collection, The City Outside the Sentence (Ashkal Alwan, 2015) and Notes on Mother Tongues (UDP, 2020). She has contributed essays and short stories to e-flux journal, Vida, The Brooklyn Rail, LitHub, and Guernica, among others. Her next book, The Autobiography of a Language, is forthcoming with Futurepoem (2022).
- Year2017
- Runtime19 minutes
- LanguageEnglish
- CountryGermany
- PremiereSharjah Biennale 2017
- ScreenwriterMirene Arsanios
- ProducerComissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation
- FilmmakerSetareh Shahbazi
- EditorFrank Vetter
- Sound DesignNikolas Neeke
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
ANTEDOOM
ANTEDOOM translates the unrepresentable brutality of our daily newsfeeds into an artistic language that peels away from single occurrences and describes a specific feeling of strain compared to the anxious moment before a medical diagnosis is announced.
Derived from the term Anteroom – a small outer room used as a waiting room for medical inspections – ANTEDOOM refers to voyeuristic approaches to bodies, vulnerabilities and physical trauma, and in a broader sense to transparent bodies in connection to machines that have the ability to look through us. In their use within medical treatment as well as their everyday deployment at border inspections and other contemporary forms of surveillance and wide-ranging data-collection.
About the Filmmaker
Setareh Shahbazi compiles and transforms micro-narratives through conversations, collaborations, visual notes and found photographs: images from public archives and private collections, snapshots, film stills, newspapers, social media and daily newsfeeds. With a playful irreverence to the sanctity of a photograph as a mirror of reality, she drains details out of images. In trying to make sense of their broken narratives, their impossible translations into different contexts, temporalities and languages, she is constantly shifting perspectives to allow these observations to come together in a fictional afterlife. Setareh Shahbazi studied Scenography, Visual Art and Media Theory at Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design and spent the following years living and working between Beirut, Tehran, Cairo and Berlin, where she is currently based. Her work has been shown in solo shows at Tarahane Azad, Tehran; Gypsum Gallery, Cairo; 98weeks Project Space, Beirut; Contemporary Arts Forum, Santa Barbara; Galerie Sfeir-Semler, Hamburg; Montgomery, Berlin and at Karlsruher Kunstverein. She has participated in international group shows, including nbk, Berlin; Depo, Istanbul; 17 Essex, NY; Nottingham Comtemporary, UK; Sharjah Biennial 13; UAE; Kadist Art Foundation, Paris; Kunsthaus Wien; Beirut Art Center, Lebanon; Asar Gallery, Tehran; Program, Berlin; Kunstverein Frankfurt; Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut; HKW, Berlin; Fondation Cartier, Paris and Rooseum, Malmö.
Mirene Arsenios (Writing and Voice)
Mirene Arsanios is the author of the short story collection, The City Outside the Sentence (Ashkal Alwan, 2015) and Notes on Mother Tongues (UDP, 2020). She has contributed essays and short stories to e-flux journal, Vida, The Brooklyn Rail, LitHub, and Guernica, among others. Her next book, The Autobiography of a Language, is forthcoming with Futurepoem (2022).
- Year2017
- Runtime19 minutes
- LanguageEnglish
- CountryGermany
- PremiereSharjah Biennale 2017
- ScreenwriterMirene Arsanios
- ProducerComissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation
- FilmmakerSetareh Shahbazi
- EditorFrank Vetter
- Sound DesignNikolas Neeke