Exhibitions
Marwa Arsanios: cinema, resistance and new forms of shared life in Espai 13
Who Fears Ideology? Part 5: Right of Way, the latest installment in the artist's series, explores territory, law and community in an exhibition at Espai 13 of the Fundació Miró until January 18.
At the end of 2025, a year that has been especially significant for Espai 13 comes to an end, initiated with the intervention of Josu Bilbao and curated by Carolina Jiménez, which marked a new exhibition cycle. Now, the focus is on the latest proposal of this program: Who is afraid of ideology? Part 5: Right of way , by Marwa Arsanios, a work that can be visited until January 18 and that invites reflection on the tensions between politics, territory and contemporary art.
Exhibition Who Fears Ideology? Part 5: Right of Way by Marwa Arsanios. Within the Espai 13 cycle As from Here curated by Carolina Jiménez © Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona. Photos by Roberto Ruiz.
Marwa Arsanios (Washington DC, 1978) is the author of this exhibition, which is presented as a co-production with the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin and Artium Museoa in Vitoria-Gasteiz. The work shown constitutes the fifth installment of the ongoing series Who is Afraid of Ideology? (2017-), an ambitious project in which the artist explores themes related to property, law, economics and environmental sustainability.
For Arsanios, cinema functions as an instrument that allows for connecting struggles and establishing resonances between diverse contexts, all imbued with the need to imagine new forms of shared life. According to curator Carolina Jiménez, Arsanios' cinema acts as a point of reference where points of view and voices are constantly redefined, becoming a space of confrontation from which it is possible to imagine new forms of shared life.
Exhibition Who Fears Ideology? Part 5: Right of Way by Marwa Arsanios. Within the Espai 13 cycle As from Here curated by Carolina Jiménez © Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona. Photos by Roberto Ruiz.
From the beginning, Marwa Arsanios' work has approached research with rigor, conceiving discourse not as a purely theoretical exercise, but as the result of the material relations that configure and shape it. The artist questions the ideological constructs that condition perception—and even the very act of filming—while documenting and accompanying practices that sustain alternative forms of coexistence. Arsanios has woven a true ecology of resistance, connecting the Autonomous Kurdish Women's Movement in Iraq and Syria with agricultural cooperatives in Tolima, Colombia, and northern Lebanon, exploring forms of community learning, self-government, self-defense, and jurisprudence based on the right to use, as opposed to land ownership.
The plot of Who Is Afraid of Ideology? Part 5: Right of Way is animated by two types of characters. On the one hand, some rodents who speak and behave as if they were humans. At the outset, they confess that they are a little disoriented: they find themselves in a place they do not recognize. Or, rather, where they are not recognized. They are in an inappropriate territory, not their own, of bare property. On the other hand, we observe a female character who has somatized the hypothesis that the contemporary world is not only governed by cycles of exploitation and burnout, but is also crossed by a profound logic of fatigue. She has a sleepy, hunched, limping demeanor. She carries the weight of an unbearable inheritance, of a self-fulfilling prophecy. (Exhibition room sheet)
