The first solo exhibition by Marwa Arsanios, Reverse Shot, ran from 12th October 2022 to 22nd January 2023 at The Mosaic Rooms, London.
Review by Hadeel Eltayeb
Marwa Arsanios’ first London solo exhibition Reverse Shot, takes aim at epistemic understandings of land and labour, and challenges audiences to unlock new ways of knowing our economies, histories, communities and space. Solidarity can require imagination to exercise empathy with others, and imagination emerges as one of the tools of the critical pedagogy of solidarity that strongly resonates across the exhibition, across three spaces of the Mosaic Rooms. The construction of realities is important to understanding borders and Arsanios’ line of inquiry unravels the relational processes at work which creates our social infrastructures and invites us to consider how we are positioned in relation to narratives of ownership.
My introduction to the work of Marwa Arsanios was rooted in a curiosity with artistic projects that did not happen, could not happen, or remain on a list as “things left unfinished” for their creators. Arsanios gave a talk in 2018 on Greek architect Constantinos Apostolou Doxiadis, who researched and then created social housing projects in Islamabad in the 1960s. He had been invited to do years of research on social housing projects in Beirut in 1958, commissioned by the Lebanese government. The project did not end up happening, but 55 years later Arsanios created the 2013 project After Doxiadis, revisiting his plans and reimagining his design solutions as applied to the urban problems in Beirut. Speaking about the project, she had asked the audience: ‘where does the art happen? Is it in the seed of the idea, the process of making the art or is it the documentation that is shared with the audience that is worth exhibiting?’ To experience Reverse Shot was to be led through the entire artistic process, which starts with many seeds, in the form of books.
Upon entry to the exhibition Room 1, the sci-fi ecofeminist reading room features texts selected by Arsanios, critical to the exhibition’s ideological framework, such as The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth and The Dialectics of Nature by Friedrech Engels. Most meaningfully, it is also participatory, where visitors are encouraged to engage by adding discursive texts that contribute to this future-making exercise throughout the exhibition run.
Room 2 contains the greatest volume of work, with two films and a larger installation of sketches and craftwork. First, the film: Falling is not collapsing, it is extending (2016). It introduces Beirut a generation after the neoliberal capitalist drive for real estate since the end of the Lebanese civil war in 1990, where the sharp rising of land value made big business for the quick turnover of land permits. Corruption amid the continuous reconstruction of Beirut’s city centre was a catalyst for the land shortage that those living in Beirut have been living with ever since. The rubbish crisis of 2015 is featured in the film, including the rubbish dump in Karantina, the same neighbourhood that was devastated by the Beirut Port explosion of 2020.
Arsanios’ artistic practice is guided by a feminist praxis and often develops as a creative intervention within communities to propagate alternative systems of thought and to inspire collective action towards solving social problems. The film Amateurs, Stars and Extras or The Labor of Love (2012, 2018) concerns representation and exploitation, and highlights the labour of domestic work that can often be uncredited and disproportionately taken up by minority groups, especially women. It is a layered film, with commentary on subjects shifting from backstage to onstage. In the documentation of the Women’s Center for Creative Work (WCCW), which they named A Feminist Organization’s Handbook, WCCW cite a common metaphor about domestic labour in the home and apply this to the maintenance of a cultural space, the trope of dishes as indivisible from the work, part of the activism (first the dishes, then the revolution). The distinctions between labour and care, where value is attributed and where it is diminished, what is made visible and what is overlooked particularly within the context of the production of a commodity is explored poetically in Arsanios’ film.
The struggle for land rights of indigenous communities in Northern Lebanon, Syria and Iraqi Kurdistan has been the focus of the ongoing series Who’s Afraid of Ideology (2017-). In Room 3, this exhibition contains a screening of the film Who’s Afraid of Ideology: Part IV, Reverse Shot (2022), which was first screened earlier this year in its entirety as part of Documenta 15. The film uses 3D animation, performed oral stories and dialogue, interviews with subject specialists, footage of site research to make the case on behalf of a site of land in North Lebanon which the artist and allies are lobbying to change from a property with ownership rights to a commons with usership rights. The origins of Land Code rooted in Ottoman body of law and legal terms such as Waqf and Mshaa, based in Islamic theology, are outlined in methodological detail.
Social Waqf, where ownership can be halted and only usership can be allowed, is often granted to religious sites such as churches, and is difficult to acquire without due legal process and the sharing of evidence. Urban history is complicated where the land outlives its hosts; a narrator in the film ruminates “Ghosts that have inhabited the land […] They question the movement of history.” Guests and ghosts share the same root word in host. There is a persistence of this hauntology in Beirut. Decades earlier, the will of wealthy landowner Nicholas Ibrahim Sursock instructed that his mansion and his art collection be entrusted to the city of Beirut, with instruction it was held in the guardianship of waqf under the municipality until his death. His wishes to turn his home into a public museum to support the local art scene were delayed, when the former home was briefly used by the state as a guesthouse for foreign dignitaries. By 1957, Sursock’s wishes were closer to being honored and a committee was appointed to support what would eventually become the Sursock Museum, then planned what was described as “the first imaginary museum” at UNESCO’s Beirut palace, inspired was by André Malreaux’s “musee imaginaire”. It had been imagined as a museum without walls, full of reproductions of artworks that (once) could not have practically shared the same space. The Sursock Museum is not mentioned in the film, but its origins and recent history came to mind where Arsanios’ film makes a poignant point about the social formations built upon the land being like sediments which can shift with tectonic plates; ‘who can disrupt inheritance but an earthquake?’ The intimacy of people to the cultivation of the land which gives them common ground, identity and shared experience, can be threatened by seismic shocks created by nature and by other people. Changing laws, corruption and subjugation that disrupt the natural order of inheritance, but the legacy of land, in what gets left behind; for communities to care for the land, the act of caring is rooted in imaginative exercise which sees the value of the land beyond its social function in proximity to human life.
The immersive film projected in Room 3 is next to a small installation with text excerpts from the charter draft which may be annexed to these lands if Arsanios and other supporters of this land are successful. The exhibition ends on the critical practice of imagining, sharing and emancipating ideas in visions of the future.
Imagine the land itself demands separation?
Avoid the fetishizing land.
It is not fetishizing, it is imagining.