What remains in motion, following [Exercises] on Trials
11 April 2026, 4pm
In this event, artists Jasmina Metwaly and Philip Rizk move between, image, text and voice to reflect on theatricality, montage and the political life of images, following what remains in motion from their ongoing collaborative research [Excercises] on Trials (2016/2020).
This includes the screening of two films; Rizk’s essay film Mapping Lessons (2020, 60’) assembles found footage and archival material and excerpts from fiction films to follow ghosts of political events across history, beginning with the moment of the Syrian revolution. Alongside Metwaly’s Anbar (2019, 19’) reflects on the choreography of statehood and authority through the figure of a military tailor. Together both films take moments of revolution and crisis as starting points, interrogating how images participate in the production of political knowledge.
The artists will also share new directions in their individual practices. Metwaly will present material from her ongoing artistic and doctoral research project Mahagonny - Imagined Archives, which draws on her experiences during the Arab Spring in Egypt, her long-term engagement with movements of resistance and her family history. One thread of the project begins with her late father, theatre-maker and translator Hanaa Abdelfattah’s unfinished work on an Arabic version of “Alabama Song” from Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. From there, the work moves through archival fragments, personal recordings, oral testimonies, and materials from the 858.ma archive. A more recent layer of the project is shaped by recordings made with her mother, Dorota Metwaly, in Szczecin, where intimate daily scenes come into relation with political memory, historical rupture and the afterlives of unfinished projects. Rizk will share material from Land Listening, a work that engages with a Nubian cosmology disrupted through the forced dispossession of communities from the banks of the Nile in the name of Third World nationalism.
By combining projection with storytelling, the artists transform reflection into a performative act, an invitation to think together about how political and theatrical moments and movements translate into film.
Their joint publication On Trials: a manual on the theatre of law (2021, Archive Books) will be available to purchase after the event.
Part of the public programme Footnote to the Present, this is the second of two corresponding events in which Jasmina Metwaly and Philip Rizk convene to reflect on the role of performance and theatricality in their work, both collaborative and individual across the years.
Image: Film still, Mapping Lessons by Philip Rizk, 2020. Courtesy of artist.
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Ticket £5. Spaces are limited.
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ARTIST BIO
Philip Rizk is a filmmaker and writer from Cairo currently living in Berlin. In his films, he experiments with methods of “making the habitual strange.” In Out on the Street (2015) he uses performance, in his found footage films Mapping Lessons (2020) and Terror Tales (2024) he experiments with montage. Along with the filmmaker Baya Medhaffer, Rizk is developing the upcoming Majliss Fanon, a film programme around Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. He is also editor of the forthcoming book Neocolonialism and its Dismantling, which puts Fanon’s final book in conversation with the thawrat of the Arabic-speaking region over the past 15 years.
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