Digital Church & Al Aqsa Park
A Digital Translation of a Biblical Story, 2007
In his video work A Digital Translation for a Biblical Story, the artist reads out the Maryam (Maria) Suras (1-36) from the Qur'an while pacing up and down in the baroque church of the Kartause Ittingen, Switzerland, in front of the altar.
The film is shown as a video installation inside an archaic cabana built with wooden branches. The Muslim artist reads the sura about Maria, Mother of God, in a pristine praying room. This prayer concerns both religions, Christianity and Islam, emphasizing the intercommunity of both, perhaps all, religions.
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Al Aqsa Park, 2006
Al Aqsa Park is an animated film installation where the Dome of the Rock, the symbolic referring to the Al-Aqsa complex in Jerusalem, is displayed as a fairground carousel. Although the work brings an additional reflection on the intersection of the discourses of political systems and religiosity, the Al Aqsa Park installation is essentially centered on the idea of controlled entertainment that the experience of riding a carousel, as well as its spectacle, delivers. The carousel, conventionally the center-piece of a fair, circling at a speed to generate weightlessness and ‘freedom’, is actually a machine maneuvered by an operator, according to a tightly controlled schedule.
Al-Aqsa mosque is the third most important mosque in Islam after al Masjid al-Haram (The sacred Mosque) in Mecca then Al-Masjid al-Nabawi (The Prophet's Mosque) in Medina.
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Telematch, 2007
Telematch series, 2007-2009
The Telematch series is a film, video installtion, and drawing series consisting of Telematch Upper Egypt, Telematch Sadat, Telematch Suburb, Telematch Shelter, and Telematch Crusades. This series is a reference to Telematch, the famous German television program broadcast in the 70s and 80s, in which inhabitants of two different German towns faced off against one another in a series of elaborate and timed games. This concept of constructing a contest or clash between two factions to benefit the entertainment of a third group forms the basis of Wael Shawky's Telematch series concept, although his are completely staged interactions. He documents these happenings so as to frame them in an artistic context, one in which the entertained party is the audience. With this new frame the project stages an in depth examination of the relationships between genders, social classes, cultural, economic, and political models, and generations of people from the 1970s to today in Egypt. The gladiatorial-style match-ups function on multiple levels, from the initial clash to the layers of meaning between the subjects Shawky selects.