عودة أوزيريس + وعلى صعيد آخر

Curated by Iskandar Abdalla

عودة أوزيريس(The Return of Osiris)
Essa Grayeb, Palestine 2019, 13 min. Arabic with English subtitles

وعلى صعيد آخر (And On a Different Note)
Mohamed Hassan Shawky, Egypt USA, 2015, 23 min. Arabic with English subtitles

Nations are spectacular templates of narration that anchor time in space, pasts into presents, and couple signs with meaning to forge us as their conscripted subjects. To belong to a nation is, in effect, to make sense of oneself in relation to imagined geographies and temporalities, learned modes of sensing, feeling, and knowing. It is to envision one’s reality in terms of a set of common references: images, sounds, and vocabularies—a depository of representations that stand for and by themselves as our ersatz reality. In their films, Essa Grayeb and Mohammed Shawky Hassan engage with grand visual and sonic tropes that narrate Egypt as a nation, revealing the ambitions, claims of power, anxieties, and sentiments of loss that underlie them. In doing so, both attempt to carve out their own place, to craft their own sense of meaning through and against the grain of popular representations, whether addressing Nasser’s legacy in Egyptian films and TV shows, as in Grayeb’s film, or the post-/counter-revolutionary tumult in political talk shows. A nagging question remains: how can one subvert a haunting archive of visual and sonic memories imbricated in the very making of who we are? (IA)

Essa Grayeb is a Palestinian visual artist based in Jerusalem. His practice traverses a range of media, primarily photography, moving image, and installation.

Mohammad Hassan Shawky is an Egyptian filmmaker and writer living and working in Berlin.