Courtesy of Marwa Arsanios
Merely a Smell (title after Maher Abi Samra’s film) | Activity
Activity
Thursday, 15 January 2026
Reading by Marwa Arsanios
This talk will take Maher Abi Samra’s film from 2007 as its starting point to look at images in the aftermath of the continuous zionist wars on Lebanon.
It will go through different excerpts of films and literary texts to think about the recurrence of destruction and the filmic confrontation with the corpseto then move – through more historical examples – to another type of image which is the militant image. Could a juxtaposition of the militant image with the image of destruction help us think about another type of militant image where grief becomes part and parcel of the struggle?
The talk will also explore film as device for struggle and internationalist solidarity and montage as a way of constructing collective dreamscapes for liberation.
participant
Her practice tackles structural and infrastructural questions using different devices and strategies. From architectural spaces, their transformation and adaptability throughout conflict, to artist-run spaces and temporary conventions between feminist communes and cooperatives. In the past four years Arsanios has been trying to think about these questions from a new materialist and a historical materialist perspective with different feminist movements that are struggling for their land. She tries to look at questions of property, law, economy and ecology from specific plots of land. The main protagonists become these lands and the people who work them. Her research includes many disciplines and is deployed in numerous collective methodologies and collaborative projects. Solo shows include: Kunsthalle Bratislava (2023), Heidelberger Kunstverein (2023), Mosaic Rooms, London (2022), Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (2021). She is currently a PhD candidate at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna.
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Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.
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