Marwa Arsanios is an artist, a filmmaker and a researcher. She pursues a collaborative and cross-disciplinary research practice and reconsiders the politics of the mid-twentieth century from a contemporary perspective. Recent solo exhibitions include Beirut Art Center (2017) and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016). Her films have been shown at Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2011, 2017) and Berlin International Film Festival (2010, 2015), among others.

 

Who Is Afraid of Ideology

Digital video, color, sound

2017-2019

Reasserting the fundamentals of life against machineries of capitalist exploitation is the core of today’s anti-colonial struggle for wider social and political change. In places such as Northern Syria and Colombia women claim the right to the land and to reconnect with nature in an unmediated way. Self-defense, eco-feminism, ownership, healing, resisting state control, autonomy, collectivity, indigenous struggle, seed protection, and land rights define the common ground of women who are resisting extractivist industries.

Who is Afraid of Ideology? Part I (2017) and Part 2 (2019) are shaped around interviews the artist made with members of the Kurdish Autonomous Women’s Movement in Iraqi Kurdistan and Jinwar, a women-only commune in northern Syria, exploring the possibilities of a political praxis based on an existence close to nature and within armed struggle. While producing the films, Arsanios organized different meetings with women farmers and ecological feminists from Syria, Lebanon, Colombia, Mexico, India, Poland, Denmark, and Greece to exchange knowledge around their cooperatives and communes.

Who Is Afraid of Ideology Part III draws from these intense exchanges and footage partly filmed in the south of Tolima in Colombia, focusing on the ongoing systemic war waged by transnational corporations against the smallest and the most essential element of life—the seed. The last film in the trilogy connects the violent history of murder and purge to the seed guardians. _Ovul Durmusoglu

Who Is Afraid of Ideology Part I & II, 2017-2019, 56' 33"
Who Is Afraid of Ideology Part III, 2020, 31'17"

 

Have You Ever Killed A Bear or Becoming Jamila

HD video, 25’26”

2013-2014

Video based on a performance that started with an investigation of Jamila Bouhired, an Algerian woman fighting for freedom. The research focuses on Jamila’s different representations in cinema, her integration and promotion in the 1960s and 1970s in the Egyptian magazine Al-Hilal, which was an important Arab cultural magazine.

Have You Ever Killed A Bear or Becoming Jamila, 2013-2014, HD video, 25' 26"
 

Who’s Afraid of Ideology? Ecofeminist Practices Between Internationalism and Globalism

Essay

2018

 

The Production of the Utopian Image

Essay

2020