Marianne Fahmy
Marianne Fahmy is an Alexandria-based artist who works with video and installation art. Her focus is on power structure in society and their impact on people, texts, architecture and language. She’s concerned with undocumented historical narratives, where she finds material for creative additions. In her work she relies on interviews she conducts with people related to the work and archival material she finds.
Her film 31 Silent Encounters speaks of the history of communist activists in Egypt, which is not properly documented. After conducting interviews with activists from the 1950’s and intensive research on the untold narratives, Marianne create a non-linear conversation between a communist activist and his wife in the 1950’s, who speak of memories in Alexandria and the intellectual oppression at that time. The film shows a present site specific mapping of the city based on the letters sent from the wife of architecture from the 1950’s, as the buildings are perceived as concrete archive, that show the political and social change.
In her current work Marianne Fahmy adopts the term “Fabulation” by Gilles Deleuze, the mode of becoming is that of fashioning larger-than- life images. The latter transform conventional representations and conceptions of collectivities, thereby enabling the invention of a people to come.
Marianne’s work was recently exhibited at Dak’art Biennale in Dakar and Kino der Kunst film festival in Munich, and is invited to showcase her work at the Havana Biennale in 2019.
