Wael Shawky

Dual event in Turin with the site-specific installations by the Egyptian artist Wael Shawky, who joins mythological visions with the material physical world.

The Crusades as we’ve never seen them before, amidst history – with its names, its dates, its facts and its interpretation from numerous literary sources outside our own tradition and belonging to the Arabs who actually suffered the Crusades. Then there’s the Middle East – how it is and how it was – with its present and its past, its reality and its myths intimately intertwined to create a story both contradictory and surreal. These are the themes of Wael Shawky’s two projects, on display in Turin, at the Castello di Rivoli and the Fondazione Merz, respectively.

In both cases, the projects have taken the form of a video trilogy on view as part of a large environmental installation, created specifically for the venues.

The Crusades through Arab Eyes, already exhibited at various prestigious locations around the world, including Documenta 13 curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, is a work by Shawky made between 2010 and 2015, in which he narrates the Church’s military campaigns in the Holy Land, as described by many medieval Islamic sources, and in particular by the Lebanese historian Amin Maalouf in his book The Crusades through Arab Eyes. The characters are not real actors but rather marionettes.

Wael Shawky, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Torino. Photo Renato Ghiazza

Wael Shawky, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Torino. Photo Renato Ghiazza

Wael Shawky, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Torino. Photo Renato Ghiazza

Wael Shawky, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Torino. Photo Renato Ghiazza

Wael Shawky, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Torino. Photo Renato Ghiazza

The first film, Cabaret Crusades: The Horror Show File, which describes the Crusades between 1096 and 1099 and which Shawky made while in residence at the Fondazione Pistoletto in Biella, uses antique marionettes from the Lupi Collection in Turin. For the second work, Cabaret Crusades: The Path to Cairo, on the Crusades between 1099 and 1145, the artist employs ceramic marionettes crafted in France, at Aubagne, a place that is famous for terracotta production related to Christian iconographic traditions, but not only. Aubagne is close to Clermont, the town where Pope Urban II held his sermon calling for the first armed expedition to the Holy Land and, therefore, the start of the Crusades.

The Secrets of Karbala, the final chapter in this video trilogy, uses glass marionettes made in Murano. The characters possess both human and animal forms. Here as well the choice is not accidental but rather due to the key role Venice played during the Crusades. This last work in the trilogy opens with the Battle of Karbala in 680, the main tragic event that led to the division between Shiites and Sunnis that exists even today. It ends with the Crusaders capturing Constantinople in 1204. The work highlights the ambition and rivalry, betrayal and violence that undermine humanity.

These three videos are shown inside three constructions. In fact, the artist has transformed the Manica Lunga, whose walls have been painted blue, into a unified stage design. The itinerary unfolds across medieval towers, minarets and gardens, inhabited by the marionettes starring in the works. The dominant installation colours are pink and sky-blue, with splashes of gold here and there: an explicit wink at Western iconographic sources, especially Giotto. However, attention to Western art and its interpretation of history is also present in other works, displayed along the walls. These include a high-relief reproduction of Delacroix’s Crusaders’ Entry into Constantinople, whose surface has been scorched black: this is Shawky’s only addition to a work that is in itself critical and extraordinarily eloquent, and an allusion to the cyclical process of the creation and destruction of human civilisations, each of which seems to rise from the ashes of the previous one.

The artist’s choice of marionettes, as well as of the original, literary and sophisticated Arabic language, from written sources, creates a sense of estrangement and highlights how tales – be they historical or mythological – possess their own powerful autonomy. The theme that preponderantly emerges from the work is that of possible narration, and its significance. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, who curated the exhibition together with Marcella Beccaria, writes: “In Shawky’s work, the effective sense of estrangement and the distance from trauma are determined by the make-believe and mechanical nature of the marionettes: the characters are objects not people in flesh and bone. At the same time, the puppet’s condition is also more in general an intense – though indirect – reference to our own age, in which things are controlled more and more at a distance . . . But Shawky does not accept the ‘remote control’ nature of experience in the digital age... Shawky’s almost outmoded devotion to craftsmanship and memory (for example when he performs to perfection a very long sura learned as a child) clashes with the leitmotiv of speed in the digital era and likens artistic practice to a kind of meditation and exercise, similar to studying or praying”.