Marwa Arsanios, Have You Ever Killed a Bear? or Becoming Jamila
April 12–May 9, 2021
Join us on e-flux Video & Film: staff picks for an onlinescreening of Marwa Arsanios’s Have You Ever Killed a Bear? or Becoming Jamila (2014), on view from Monday, April 12 through Sunday, May 9, 2021.
Marwa Arsanios, Have You Ever Killed a Bear? or Becoming Jamila, 2014
25:25 minutes
Have You Ever Killed a Bear? or Becoming Jamila is a video made after a performance whose starting point is an inquiry into Algerian freedom fighter Jamila Bouhired. The research focuses on the different representations of Jamila in cinema, as well as on her assimilation and promotion in the Egyptian cultural magazine Al-Hilal (The Crescent) during the 1960s and ’70s. The video also attempts to look at the history of Egyptian socialist projects and the Algerian anti-colonial wars, and the way they have promoted and marginalized feminist projects through the figure of Jamila. Indeed, the clear gender division used to marginalize women in the public sphere was overcome for a short moment during the Algerian war of independence—Jamila becoming its icon. But what does it mean to become an icon, and to play the role of the freedom fighter? Between role playing and political projects, where does the agency of subject constitution sit?
Marwa Arsanios is an artist, filmmaker, and researcher who reconsiders politics of the mid-twentieth century from a contemporary perspective, with a particular focus on gender relations, urbanism, and industrialization. She approaches research collaboratively and seeks to work across disciplines. She is co-founder of 98weeks Research Project, and is currently a PhD candidate at the Akademie der bildenden Kunst in Vienna.
About the program
e-flux Video & Film: staff picks is a monthly streaming program of staff picks and recommended videos designed to disrupt the monotony of an algorithm. Before the end times of big data, we used to discover suggested content along dusty shelves in video rental stores, where post-it notes scribbled by shift workers implored us to experience the same movies that made them guffaw, scream, or weep. Sometimes the content bored us, sometimes it overwhelmed us, and sometimes, as if by magic, it was just right. e-flux invites you to relive this rental store mode of perusal, with personalized picks curated through judgment that does not take into consideration your viewing history.
For more information, contact program [at] e-flux.com.
