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Events

17 Feb 2022

Lecture Performance

TWO UNIFORMS AND ONE COSTUME
on filming, tailor making: what to duplicate and how and where to replicate
Jasmina Metwaly

7 pm, duration 60 minutes


rosa murales

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.


Jasmina Metwaly, born in Warsaw in 1982, studied at Central Saint Martins College in London and lived in Cairo for a long time until she left the city after the failure of the so-called Arab Spring. She now lives in Berlin. While she was active in Cairo as a filmmaker and co-founder of the Mosireen Collective and the media archive 858.ma, in recent years she has devoted herself to the voice of people and their unheard stories in audio and video works. In research processes she explores the question of how images are collected and archived and how - reactivated - they can find new meanings. Jasmina Metwaly has participated in numerous exhibitions and screenings internationally and has had solo exhibitions at Kunst-Werke Berlin (2020) and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2019 /20), among others. In 2015 /16, she was a co-curator of the Imaginary School Program at the Beirut exhibition space in Cairo. In 2020 /21, together with Kamila Metwaly, she received The Berlin Artistic Research Grant.

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