Cabaret Crusades: The Path to Cairo
18 May — 23 July 2017
- Artists
- Wael Shawky
- Venue
- Museu d’Història de Catalunya
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The Path to Cairo is the second part in a trilogy documenting the Crusades as documented in Arab sources. This segment, documenting the events between the first and second Crusades, blends puppetry and musical theatre.
Cabaret Crusades is a trilogy of videos dealing with the history of the Crusades. The screenplay is based on an essay by Lebanese author Amin Maalouf, The Crusades through Arab Eyes (1983), which draws from Arab historical sources to subvert the traditional Western reading of the Medieval religious wars. Wael Shawky reenacts these bloody events through marionettes, transforming the historical reconstruction into a form of entertainment, as the title of the series explicitly suggests.
The second chapter of the trilogy, The Path to Cairo (2012), produced by Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo for dOCUMENTA (13), recounts the events that happened between the first and the second Crusade, between 1099 and 1145, and is structured as a musical. In this case, Shawky collaborated with potters and Provençal santonnier makers to create the ceramic marionettes that comprise the cast, and with choirs of fishermen and children from Bahrein for the musical performances.
In Shawky’s work, the evident artificiality and the taste for a blatant, emphatic theatrical style are functional to a reflection on the ways in which History is written and passed down. It is not so much a question of authenticity as of perspective, of acknowledging multiple viewpoints, an attitude that Shawky carries to extremes by turning the written historical account into images, thereby shifting from the academic register to that of spectacle.
Wael Shawky
- Artist
1971, Alexandria
Wael Shawky (Alexandria, Egypt, 1971) studied Fine Arts at the Universities of Alexandria and Pennsylvania (United States). Creator and founder/director of MASS Alexandria, the first independent study programme for young artists in this city, today he is one of the most prominent contemporary African artists. Shawky, who lives and works in Alexandria, focuses his work on the notions of identity, religion and the collective. Through films, installations and performances that blur the boundaries between reality and fiction, Shawky explores history, culture and the effect of globalisation in contemporary societies. Whether working with child actors or puppets, organising a heavy metal concert in a remote Egyptian village or simulating televised shows, Shawky approaches contemporary culture through the lens of historical tradition and vice versa. With a simple yet powerful language, his reviews of poetic myths and epic tales of medieval battles between Christians and Muslims fruitfully invert the usual discourse of historiography. His famous trilogy with puppets on the spiritual and doctrinal conflict between Muslim and Christian worship brings new meaning to the narrative of the present. Shawky has had solo exhibitions at the Serpentine Gallery, London (2013), Kunst-Werke Contemporary Art Institute, Berlin (2012), Nottingham Contemporary (2011) and Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (2011), among others, and has presented his work at Documenta XIII, Kassel (2012) and in the Biennales of SITE Santa Fe in the American state of New Mexico (2008), Istanbul (2005) and Venice (2003). His work is included in collections such as Tate Modern, London, Macro Museum, Rome, Darat Al Funun, Amman, Luxembourg Museum of Modern Art, APT Dubai and MACBA, Barcelona.
19 April 2017
