‘Who is Afraid of Ideology?’ (part 1-4, dir. Marwa Arsanios, 2017-2022, 122 min)

Each part in the Who Is Afraid of Ideology? focuses on alternative social formations and histories of popular resistance in different places. Part I (2017) and Part 2 (2019) emerged from the artist’s research into the Kurdish autonomous women’s movement and Jinwar, a women-only village in the north of Syria. Part 3: Micro Resistencias (2020) centers on Indigenous farmers in Colombia who preserve native seeds from extinction. With Part 4: Reverse Shot (2022) – the video on view in the Art Institute galleries – the artist took a new and speculative direction. Set in a quarry in the mountains of northern Lebanon, Reverse Shot follows Arsanios and several collaborators as they attempt to extricate a parcel of land from the construct of ownership. The video documents the group’s efforts to change the legal status of the quarry into a common land belonging to the community. Arsanios used a range of visual techniques – from fantastical animation to worm’s-eye-view camera work – to explore the history and future of the land.

Director’s bio

Artist, researcher, and filmmaker Marwa Arsanios was born in 1978 in Washington, D.C. She has been the subject of multiple solo exhibitions, including Notes for a Choreography, Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon, Portugal (2015); Hammer Projects: Marwa Arsanios, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2016); Marwa Arsanios: A Letter Inside a Letter, Contemporary Arts Centre, Cincinnati, OH (2021); and Marwa Arsanios: Matter of Alliances, Heidelberger Kunstverein, Germany (2023). She has also participated in many group exhibitions, including No Soul For Sale, Tate Modern, London, UK (2010); Here and Elsewhere, The New Museum, New York, NY (2014); Temporal, Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico (2019); and All That We Have in Common, Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje, Macedonia (2021). Arsanios currently lives and works between Berlin and Beirut.