Ways of reading

The broad frame of investigation in which Marwa Arsanio’s practice operates, is the different aspects of the relationship between the cultural realm, politics and violence. And by the cultural realm she means its politics, economies and social manifestations. She has been looking, through different material objects, at the way violence affects culture, and the way it gets affected by it and reproduces it.

The way history is produced after that violence occurs, and how violence is then integrated into the economy of the present and in particular the economy of art, the material economy of buildings, the economy of the art institution buildings, or the art structure and the economy of space and ecology is also inclusive of the bodies participating in the production of this violence, the way they become affected by it, and in their turn produce it, which makes them an inherent part of this system of production, through their labor, speech or other forms of participation.

The affected bodies, spaces, affects, objects, ephemeras, languages, books etc… all struggle to articulate themselves in a clear way, whether through movement or speech. The dismembered movements and actions attempt to make a coherent bodily action despite the pain that is provoked.

In the past ten years, Marwa Arsanios has been looking at the material residues of this violence (from architecture to books, magazines, ephemeras, to dance, an anthropological PhD thesis and most recently the appropriation of land into the sea through the material use of garbage and rubble and the financial profit made out of garbage). What comes out of these investigations (the artworks themselves) might not be violent per say. Far from being a representation of violence, they are rather an attempt to look at hidden or undetected violence whether structural, ideological or personal.

Thinking about these questions from a historical materialist perspective, and through specific materials and objects, and looking at violence as an inherent systemic power that is approved by hegemonic politics, and through politics and its technologies and strategies that are structurally instated (example: justified state violence) but also clearly differentiating it from its potential as an emancipatory force (example: armed struggles and self-defense), Marwa Arsanios will go through few specific projects that concretize these ideas.