Who Is Afraid of Ideology?

SCREENING AND DISCUSSION:

Who Is Afraid of Ideology? Part 1 and 4

by Marwa Arsanios

Organised by Alex Martinis Roe

6:00-8:30pm, Saturday 20 September, 2025

Marwa Arsanios’s video quadrilogy Who Is Afraid of Ideology? (2017–2022) interweaves stories of eco-feminist resistance across four regions—Kurdistan, Syria, Colombia, and Lebanon. Part 1 explores Kurdish women’s self-governance: members of the Autonomous Women’s Movement in Iraqi Kurdistan and inhabitants of the women-only Jinwar commune in northern Syria. The film documents their political practice rooted in ecology, collectivism, and defence of their land. Part 4, Reverse Shot (2022), reflects on inheritance, ownership, and visibility through a project transforming Arsanios’s family olive grove in northern Lebanon into a shared commons farmed by Syrian refugees. The films connect struggles rooted in nature-based collective life to a critique of ideological and neoliberal societal structures, asking, in Marwa’s words,

How can one think of ecological markers, traces of voiding, and communalising of the land? What kind of methodology would capture not only the ruination of land and displacement of humans, but also the world-making and resistance of communities that are involved in processes of reappropriation?

Marwa Arsanios is currently in residence at the Victorian College of the Arts as a Stuart Black Fellow. The discussion with her after the screening will be led by a reading group convened by Alex Martinis Roe with Lauren Burrow, Ruth Höflich, Therese Keogh, and Tessa Laird to engage with Marwa’s research during her fellowship. The reading group includes analysis of property and colonialism, as well as reflection on sustainable, equitable ways for communities to live and interact responsibly with their surroundings.

Marwa Arsanios’ practice tackles structural questions using different devices, forms and strategies. From architectural spaces, their transformation and adaptability throughout conflict, to artist-run spaces and temporary conventions between feminist communes and cooperatives, the practice tends to make space within and parallel to existing art structures allowing experimentation with different forms of assemblies. Film becomes another form and a space for connecting struggles in the way images refer to each other. In the past four years Arsanios has been attempting 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.

Solo shows include: Sandretto Foundation (2025), BAK Utrecht (2024), Kunsthalle Bratislava (2023), Heidelberger Kunstverein (2023), Mosaic Rooms, London (2022), Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (2021); Skuc Gallery, Ljubljana (2018); Beirut Art Center (2017); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016); Witte de With, Rotterdam (2016); Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon (2015); and Art in General, New York (2015). Her work has also been featured in numerous group exhibitions including: Documenta 15 (2022), Mardin biennial (2022), Sydney Biennial film program (2022), 3rd Autostrada Biennale, Pristina (2021); 11th Berlin Biennale (2020); The Renaissance Society, Chicago (2020); Gwangju Biennial (2018); Lülea Biennial (2018); Kunsthalle Wien (2019); 1st Sharjah Architecture Triennial (2019); SF Moma, San Francisco (2019); Warsaw Biennial (2019); 14th Sharjah Biennale (2019); Maxxi Museum, Rome (2017); Ludwig Museum, Cologne (2016); Thessaloniki Biennial (2015); Home Works Forum, Ashkal Alwan, Beirut (2010, 2013, 2015); New Museum, New York (2014); 55th Venice Biennial (2013); M HKA, Antwerp (2013),); the 12th Istanbul Biennial (2011).

Arsanios was a researcher in the Fine Art Department at the Jan Van Eyck Academie, Maastricht (2010–12). She completed a PhD at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna and is now Professor at the The Royal Academy of Fine Arts (KASK) in Ghent.