Al Araba Al Madfuna is a major exhibition by the artist Wael Shawky (Alexandria, Egypt, 1971) winner of the first edition of the Mario Merz Prize.
The site-specific exhibition project revolves around the Al Araba Al Madfuna film trilogy, presented for the first time in its entirety. Wael Shawky invites you to go through the physical elements that make up the film: stage architecture and sculptures set up in an artificial landscape of sand.
The scenography thus produced, together with the projections, offer the possibility of an immersive experience between dream and reality and create an original atmosphere that incorporates the historical, literary and cinematographic references with which the artist has imagined his stories.
With Araba Al Madfuna Shawky's interest continues, already explored in various projects over the last ten years, in using pre-existing tales and stories that are part of our culture, as a starting point for cinematographic investigation. His oeuvre is based on historical accounts, sociological interpretations and narrative works, from which he builds his way of looking at the myths of the past together with the realities of the present.
Al Araba Al Madfuna films were filmed in the village of the same name shrouded in ancient myths and legends and located near Osirion's excavations of the Temple of Seti I, in the ancient city of Abydos in Egypt. The trilogy reflects on the community's oral storytelling rituals, where stories repeated and handed down over time become legendary stories that re-propose themselves as a new interpretation of change and progress.
Wael Shawky explores the possibilities of interpreting literature, producing films with a modern theatrical and cinematic style. Children dressed as adults in the traditional gallabiya, with turban and false mustache, tell the parables of the Egyptian writer Mohamed Mustagab's Dayrout al-Shareif (1983). Their narration combines with the staging of a fact inspired by Shawky's encounter with the villagers who were digging tunnels under their houses, hoping to find hidden treasures, according to the stories handed down by their ancestors. Similarly, Mohamed Mustagab's parables connect mythological perspectives of the metaphysical world, the invisible with the physical material world. The stories written in verse, in the ancient Arabic language, also take up issues of our contemporaneity, in a duality that is also reflected in the composition of the films.
Al Araba Al Madfuna I (2012) is based on Mustagab's short story, The JB-R's, which tells of a tribe called the Al Jabarina. The story takes place over many years, with the alternating tribal elders who share their advice on which animal the village should adopt - first a donkey, then a camel, and finally a pig - as an offering for a future of prosperity.
Al Araba Al Madfuna II (2013) takes up two short stories, The Offering and Horsemen Adore Perfumes. The first tells of a village that has become mysteriously mute and forced to review its trading methods, based in principle on the power of speech and spoken language. In the last story, a beautiful enchantress of royal blood, feared by her subjects, captures and marries a series of unsuspecting knights who all meet a fateful fate.
Al Araba Al Madfuna III (2015-16) is inspired by Mustagab's short story, Sunflowers. In the story, the sunflower becomes a metaphor for inventiveness and change, and for the ability to adopt new ideas. The village gives a new meaning to a worthless plant, makes it its main product, transforming it into a real treasure, replacing a simple agricultural product with a plant that lends itself to new entertainment needs.
Unlike the previous black and white films, this one was made in color and reversed in negative, underlining the conceptual approach of relating the real universe to the metaphysical one.
Wael Shawky is the winner of the first edition of the Mario Merz Prize, an international biennial award for art and music. He was chosen by a jury made up of Manuel Borja-Villel, Massimiliano Gioni, Beatrice Merz, Lawrence Weiner together with the vote of the public. The announcement was made on May 6, 2015 in Venice on the occasion of the opening of the Mario Merz exhibition at the Gallerie dell'Accademia and the 56th edition of the Venice Biennale.
Together with the exhibition at the Merz Foundation, a retrospective of the artist opens at the Castello di Rivoli, curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Marcella Beccaria.
