Marwa Arsanios: Who is Afraid of Ideology?

1 December 2022 at 6 p. m.
UMPRUM Technology Center, Mikulandská 134/5, Praha, Room No. 017, 1st floor 

Free entrance

What if land was owned by those who use it and need it? Land ownership has had many different forms in the past. Can we learn from them nowadays?

The event will start with a public screening of Marwa Arsanios video Who is Afraid of Ideology? Part IV: Reverse Shot (2022). Marwa Arsanios is the UMPRUM Visiting Artist in the fall term of 2022/23. Her video was presented at documenta 15. It is part of a long-term project led by Arsanios that explores themes of the commons and land ownership through the lenses of gender relations, agriculture, reclamation and resistance - this 4th installment, shown at documenta 15, shows the story of communalization within a mountain quarry in Northern Lebanon. The series documents communities not only in Lebanon, Arsanios‘ home country, but also in Kurdistan and southern Columbia.

After the screening, Marwa Arsanios will talk with the anthropologist Karolína Žižková, who is researching land grabs and their social and environmental consequences in the Global South. The discussion will be presented by Anna Remešová, a writer, acitivist and editor from Artalk online art magazine. 

Marwa Arsanios is an artist, filmmaker and researcher who reconsiders politics of the mid-twentieth century from a contemporary perspective, with a particular focus on gender relations, urbanism and industrialization. She approaches research collaboratively and seeks to work across disciplines. 

Arsanios has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Skuc gallery in Lujubljana (2018) at the Beirut Art Center (2017); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016); Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (2016); Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon (2015) and Art in General, New York (2015). Her work has also been shown in a number of group exhibitions, including documenta 15 (2022), Warsaw Biennial (2019), Sharjah Biennial (2019), The Gwangju Biennial (2018), and many others. She is the co-founder of 98weeks Research Project. 

Arsanios received a Master of Fine Art, University of the Arts London (2007) and was a researcher in the Fine Art Department, Jan Van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, The Netherlands (2011–2012). She is currently a PhD candidate at the Akademie der bildenden Kunst in Vienna. 

Karolína Žižková is an anthropologist and environmentalist. She specializes in postcolonial studies and ecological economics, especially focusing on approaches to land and soil. She lives in Ústí nad Labem, where she collaborates with Hraničář gallery, interconnecting the perspectives of ecology and art. She graduated from Brno FSV MU Environmental Department with her thesis Land Grabs Legitimisation in The Global South: Development Discourse vs. Ontological Pluralism.

Marwa Arsanios: Still from Who is Afraid of Ideology? (2022)