Performing an Archive
Thursday, December 12, 2019 12:30 pm – 2:00 pm EST/GMT-5Bard College Berlin Lecture Hall, Platanenstr. 98a, Berlin-Pankow
A talk by Jasmina Metwaly
On December 12, 2019 Bard College Berlin is pleased to host Polish-Egyptian artist Jasmina Metwaly for a talk entitled "Performing an Archive."
Born to a a Polish mother and an Egyptian father, Jasmina Metwaly is a Cairo-Berlin-based artist and filmmaker, and co-founder of Mosireen collective and media archive 858.ma. She works in video and film, and has recently started drawing again. She likes to work with people and their histories, with different materials including texts and archival material such as: scripts, drawings, lectures, manuals and images.
Rooted in performance and theater, her works focus on process-based practices that have a social effect through which tensions between participants and audiences are generated. Taking a position of an onlooker/ storyteller, she investigates the ways in which images transgress, how the role of the person behind the camera changes with stories, and how these impact collective memory. Her works is process based, scrutinizing the methodology of the making itself, how images are collected and archived and how they can take on new meanings when de-constructed from their primal intention. She is interested in how stories create stories blurring the preconceived boundaries between documentation and fiction.
Metwaly’s work has been exhibited at international art venues and festivals including Townhouse Gallery in Cairo, IFFR–International Film Festival Rotterdam, Sfeir-Semler Gallery and Berlinale Forum Expanded. Since 2010 she has also collaborated on projects with filmmaker Philip Rizk. Together, they have recently co-curated a program How to Act: On Stages and Storytellers at Beirut, in Cairo. In 2015, their feature-length film, Out on the Street, was presented in the German Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale and at MoMA within the exhibition Films from Here: Recent views from the Arab world. In 2017 she was an artist in residency at the DAAD in Berlin.
The talk takes place in connection to the course Critical Human Rights and Humanitarian Advocacy/ Scholars At Risk led by Kerry Bystrom.
Date & time: Thursday, December 12, 2019, 12:30-2:00pm
Venue: Bard College Berlin Lecture Hall, Platanenstr. 98a, Berlin-Pankow
Admission free
Email: [email protected]