Marwa Arsanios: Who is Afraid of Ideology?

Marwa Arsanios’s first institutional solo exhibition in Austria presents all five parts of her film series Who is Afraid of Ideology?, a long-term project in which the artist pays tribute to communities like the Kurdish Autonomous Women’s Movement in Iraq and northeastern Syria, and Grupo Semillas in Colombia. In Part 4, Arsanios documents her attempts to rehabilitate and communalize a former quarry area in Lebanon together with a group of people, and by doing so tackles questions of usership versus ownership in both the film and real life.

What all these communities have in common is that they each struggle to reclaim a life of collectivity and togetherness with the land, practicing resistance in a manner that responds to both their specific context and respective geographies. With her film cycle, Arsanios is also searching for appropriate cinematic means to do justice to each struggle and the specific topographies in which they take place, drawing an aesthetic from them instead of filming according to a preconceived idea.

In Who is Afraid of Ideology? Part 5—co-produced in 2025 by Artium Museoa, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, and Fundació Joan Miró, together with curators Agustín Pérez Rubio and Carolina Jiménez—Arsanios reflects on the history of animalization and dehumanization in capitalist colonialism through a work of speculative fiction.

In each film, the violent contexts that necessitate self-defense, as well as the re-appropriation tactics the communities use to rehabilitate land, are recounted. Together the film series comprises a network where ecological, decolonial, and feminist practices are inextricably linked across different geographies. Who is Afraid of Ideology? is accompanied by drawings, textile works, and silkscreens that transpose elements of the films’ storytelling into a different visual register.

Curated by Nina Tabassomi

Press contact: Bastian Schwenteck, presse@taxispalais.at / T +43 512 59489404