Review: Marwa Arsanios at The Mosaic Rooms

Credit @Marwa Arsanios

By Erin Deborah

Lebanese artist, filmmaker and researcher Marwa Arsanios reconsiders 20th politics from a contemporary perspective, focusing on gender relations, urbanism and industrialisation. For her first public London solo exhibition, The Mosaic Rooms hosted a display of her work on colonial and ecological violence and the building of a relationship with the land. 

The exhibition opens with the artist’s prepared reading room, where a selection of books is provided to stimulate debate on themes relating to the exhibition. A fascinating and interactive opening to what was a well-presented and intriguing exhibition, I felt the intention behind Arsanios’ work was to engender thought and undermine typical ideologies, offering alternative perspectives on history. 

Moving to the second part, I entered the room to a dynamic picture projected on the wall. At first glance, I assumed it was some sort of abstract art. Upon further inspection, it became clear that the seemingly beautiful images were piles of rubbish found in Beirut. Falling is not collapsing, falling is extending examines the rubbish crisis of 2015, where huge amounts of garbage lined the streets, threatening the city’s environment. The artist plays on the senses to draw us in, subverting our gaze by demonstrating the darker reality behind these images. What appears to be attractive is actually dangerous, toxic. 

The true highlight of the exhibition for me was the final room, where there was a screening of the film by the artist, Who is Afraid of Ideology IV: Reverse Shot. Discussing the tensions between usership and ownership, the film explores the changing relationship we have with land, particularly as a result of colonial occupation of territory. The film manages to create an intimate relationship between the audience and the land in Lebanon, without giving us a sense of possession of it. We watch, immersed, but without dominating the landscape. The vivacity of the colours - the green of the plants, the purple of the fruits, the blue of the sky - fashion this enmeshed relationship.  

Resistant to normalised ways of thinking, Marwa Arsanios’ Reverse Shot is an ingenious collection of works revealing, and subverting, the way we envisage our relationship with the land in which we live.