Press text

Premiering Shawky’s I am Hymns of the New Temples in the Arab-speaking world, the exhibition centers around the film produced for the Pompeii Commitment program which takes as a starting point the ancient city buried under the ashes of Mount Vesuvius eruption in 79 A.D. and its multiple layers of interconnected ancient Mediterranean societies. The work questions the constructed narratives of humanity’s genesis, and how stories transmitted through space and time, across generations, millennia and continents often overlap as one civilization fades and another replaces it.