TWO UNIFORMS AND ONE COSTUME,
on filming, tailor making: what to duplicate and how and where to replicate.
Lecture performance by Jasmina Metwaly
Saturday September 18th, 19:00
Duration 60 minutes
Museum of Impossible Forms
Museum of Impossible Forms is delighted to present TWO UNIFORMS AND ONE COSTUME, on filming, tailor making: what to duplicate and how and where to replicate., a lecture performance by Jasmina Metwaly.
The lecture is about the reproducibility of a specific military uniform shaped around three garments - the Original - uniform - (worn by a leader during a military parade), the Copy - of the military uniform- (the replica made and kept in the tailor’s workshop) and the Derivative (the uniform, like costume, worn by an actor playing the leader in a film).
Taking Walter Benjamin’s aura and reproducibility as means to understand what happens to a garment once it travels from the space of a tailor’s studio and into a film set, Metwaly reflects on how the value of the work changes through its different roles and legal enactments of value. What is the value of a copy? Can a copy become an original piece if it circulates in the context of a museum? Who are the interlocutors involved in touching the Original uniform or the Original costume?
As background to this story: 1) the ″Law 313″, under which any news about the armed forces can only be issued after being granted by the director of the military intelligence; and the “new” 2014 Egyptian law that forbids importing, producing and wearing garments that resemble military uniform. For example: replicating khaki or camouflage patterns such as Multicam in the production of civilian clothing. 2) Video images produced by the hands of protesters of military interventions and violence against protests or sit-ins in Cairo the role of replicating and duplicating of the “poor image” and the role of archive - based on the work on 858.ma
About the artist:
Born to a Polish mother and an Egyptian father, Jasmina Metwaly is a Cairo- and Berlin-based artist and filmmaker, and member of the Mosireen collective and the 858.ma media archive. She works in video and film, and has recently taken up drawing again. She likes to work with people and their histories, using different materials including texts and archival material such as: scripts, drawings, lectures, manuals and images. Rooted in film and performance, her works focus on process-based practices that have a social effect through which she generates tension between participants and audiences. Taking the position of an onlooker/storyteller, she investigates the ways in which images transgress, how the role of the person behind the camera changes with stories, and how these impact collective memory. Her work is a process-based scrutinizing of the methodology of the making itself, how images are collected and archived, and how they can take on new meanings when de-constructed from their primal intention. She is interested in how stories create stories, blurring the preconceived boundaries between documentation and fiction.
This presentation has the kind support of Goethe-Institut Finland.