Performative Screenings at school in the context of the exhibition Denise Ferreira da Silva & Arjuna Neuman. Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims invited by Andrea Popelka.
Marwa Arsanios will talk to Nour Shantout about her work between the screenings.
Free admission.
The event will be held in English.
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 is an artist from Beirut. Her 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.
Nour Shantout is an artist and researcher. She was born in Damascus, Syria in 1991, and has been based in Vienna since 2015. She started studying art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Damascus in 2009 and continued her work abroad. In 2014 she received her bachelor of visual arts from the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts as well as the Helen EL Khal prize. She then pursued her studies at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. She got her diploma of fine arts at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (Textual Sculpture, Prof. Heimo Zobernig) in 2020. She is currently pursuing her PhD studies in Philosophy at the same academy. In 2021, 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). She has presented her work in the lecture series Art and Protest at Yale’s Beinecke Library and at the Palestine Museum US. Nour Shantout works around subjugated heritage, counter-memory, counter-history, labor and alienation, from a post-colonial feminist perspective.