SOUL
Window Installation
Kunst Werke / Café Bravo
Titel: SOUL
Year: 2022
Medium: Window Foil Prints
Dimensions: 375cmx600cm
Courtesy: The artist
Graphic Design: The artist and Sibel Beyer
Text: Maha El Kaisy Friemuth, Duygu Ağal, María Berríos, Sappho
LINKS https://www.kw-berlin.de/en/commission/dina-el-kaisy-friemuth/
On the large windows of KW’s Cafe Bravo, El Kaisy Friemuth continues to questions the fraught boundaries between told and untold stories, inside and outside, center and margins. The window piece includes texts by Duygu Ağal and María Berríos.
Text by Anna-Lisa Scherfose
WHAT CANNOT BE SAID WILL BE WEPT
Pogo Bar Kunst Werke
Titel: what cannot be said will be wept
Year: 2022
Medium: Event
Participants: Dina El Kaisy Friemuth, Alvozay, Ebow, Tmnit Ghide, Maha El Kaisy Friemuth
LINKS kw-berlin.de/pogo-bar
what cannot be said will be wept is an evening of storytelling by Dina El Kaisy Friemuth and her mother Maha El Kaisy in collaboration with creative platform Alvozay and writer Duygu Ağal.Together they will expand on the meaning of storytelling, the collective revision of history through our told stories, and the importance of col- lectivity from a historical perspective. According to El Kaisy Friemuth, the power of narratives lies in its deeply feminist framing: that the personal is also always political, and that stories can show us this.
“what cannot be said will be wept” is a sentence by the lesbian poet Sappho who, thousands of years ago, held feminist gatherings on Lesbos with music and poetry readings.
At KW’s Pogo Bar, El Kaisy Friemuth and Alvozay will combine sound pieces with readings, storytelling, poetry, and art to discuss strategies of feminist solidarity, to challenge the narrative of Western history and its patriar- chal notion of the individual genius, and to ask: How we can organize and support each other to create spaces for us by us? How can we care for our stories and histories?
Text By Sophie Krog Christensen
143LOVE
Floor Piece - collaboration with Jules Fischer Enter Art Fair
Title: TALES OF LOVE AND FIGHT
Year: 2022
Medium: Lenolium Prints, Performance 60min by Jules Fisher
Dimensions: 250cmx250cm
Courtesy: The artist, Jules Fisher, Enter Art Fair
Text: Shappho
SHEUT
Window Installation M1 - Hohenlocksted
Titel: SHEUT
Year: 2022
Medium: Window Foil Prints
Dimensions: 600cm x 240cm
Courtesy: The artist
Graphic Design: The artist and Sibel Beyer
Text: Maha El Kaisy Friemuth, María Ines Plázo Lázo, María Berríos, Sappho
LINKS
artandeducation: https://www.artandeducation.net/announcements/466476/dina-el-kaisy-friemuth-leonie-kelleininhabitati
m1-hohenlockstedt: https://www.m1-hohenlockstedt.de/en/kuratieren/2021-2022/in-visibilities/inhabitations/
“No History at All. Chapter 2: Sheut - The Other You” takes an exploratory approach: the second chapter of a serialized rewriting of history. For this, the exhibition space becomes an active player in a story that unfolds in the course of the show: another meeting is held here, its recording later replaces the video of the first chapter. The documentation and archiving of encounters thus becomes a fluidly applicable principle of visualization. At the same time, the windows are covered with semi-transparent, bright red comics that retell those meet- ings. They not only turn the exterior of an institution into a surface for stories which took place within it, but also make these stories part of any insight granted to its interior. The work thus creates a protected space for moments of togetherness that seem to have no material basis or consequence, becoming politically and historically effective - opening up decolonial and critical narratives through personal references.
Text by Agnieszka Roguski
NO HISTORY AT ALL
Video Installation O-Overgaden
Titel:No History At All
Year: 2021
Location: O-Overgaden, DK Medium: Carpet, Prints Dimensions: 600cm x 540cm Courtesy: The artist
Graphic Design: The artist and Sibel Beyer
Text: Maha El Kaisy Friemuth, María Ines Plázo Lázo, María Berríos, Sappho
LINKS
overgaden: https://overgaden.org/exhibitions/no-history-at-all
vimeo: https://vimeo.com/656514277
e-flux: https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/416758/dina-el-kaisy-friemuthno-history-at-allsley-ragnarsdttir
When can you define something as “past” and who owns history? With their first extensive, institutional solo exhibition No History at All artist Dina El Kaisy Friemuth critically investigates history writing as an imperialistic practice. The exhibition presents a new body of poetic works, among which are a commissioned floor carpet, a video installation, and a facade banner.
Rather than moving around the exhibition in an upright position, visitors are invited to take a seat on a large carpet decorated with political quotes and various Egyptian terms for the soul. From the soft carpet, you can watch the video work House of KA wich is staged between Neues Museum Berlin and the artists home.
The tour through the museum refers to the rising demands of former colonized peoples and nations for the re- turn of artifacts stolen by the West. The video indirectly asks whether these artifacts should be placed in their origin countries’ museums when the museum institution is defined by Western history writing? In its search for an alternative, the exhibition resuscitates the Egyptian artifacts through the mother’s tales and El Kaisy Friemuth’s cartoons, rather than leaving them inanimate and fixed in glass vitrines.
An event program accompanying the exhibition aims to include nuanced perspectives on the exhibition themes. Among other things, a newly founded union for racialized artists and cultural workers in Denmark, The Union.
STORYTELLING
Event O-Overgaden
Title: storytelling
Year: 2022
Media: Talk 60min
Location: O-Overgaden, DK
Participants: Dina El Kaisy Friemuth, Maha El Kaisy-Friemuth, AFSAR/Mooni Perry, María Inés Plaza Lazo, María Berríos, The Union /Anna Meera Gaonkar, Tanja Wol Sørensen, and Ànitá Beikpour.
LINKS:
vimeo:https://vimeo.com/662215836
publication pdf: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nRRG9ZV1mS1Qtpc4lfaqYSv2z71F5Eaw/view?usp=sharing
We invite you to take a seat on Dina El Kaisy Friemuth’s carpet and be part of a conversation with cultural workers who work collectively to explore ways of organizing together that challenge the eurocentric world- view and a patriarchal-defined concept of the individual genius. How can we organize and support each other to make places and spaces for us by us? How can we care for our stories and histories together?
El Kaisy Friemuth says: “I have invited some of my feminist colleagues to talk about why stories matter and how to create narratives of revision. Why collectivity is always a part of the story. We are not alone. Come and hear about how part of the strength of storytelling lies in its deeply feminist framing: that the personal is always also political, and that stories can show us this.”
KA
Video
Titel: KA
Year: 2021
Medium: HD-Video 3min41sec - loop
Courtesy: The artist
Cinematography: Diara Sow
Sound: Karim Friemuth
Edit: Yatri Niehaus, Arjunraj
Hair and Makeup: Titi Nana Amoako
Appearances: Duygu Ağal, Derya Yıldırım, Ebru Düzgün, Maha El Kaisy Friemuth, Dina El Kaisy Friemuth
Text: Maha El Kaisy Friemuth, Duygu Ağal, María Berríos
vimeo: https://vimeo.com/667850092
Accompanied by a horror-inspired soundscape, we follow El Kaisy Friemuth, along with three family members, as they observe Egyptian sculptures at the Neues Museum in Berlin after hours. El Kaisy Friemuth’s mother, who used to be an Egyptian tourist guide, tells stories about Egyptian mythology while the video jumps between footage of her and her audience sitting in the museum and in the home. In this way, the museum’s grand storytelling is juxtaposed with the feminist gathering of El Kaisy Friemuth’s family members and their personal experiences.
Text by Rhea Dall
WELCOME TO THE CRISIS
Fulfillment Services ltd. Gasworks
Title: Welcome to the Crisis
Year: 2021
Location: Gasworks, Public spaces, London
Material: Billboards and Sound
gasworks.org.uk fulfilmentservices.ltd
Welcome to the Crisis is a series of manifestos and statements in conversation with and in response to Fulfilment Services Ltd. The work appears as notes, headlines, titles and quotations that imagine an alter- native reality of fulfilment based on fluidity within the natural world inspired by hydro-feminism.
D.N.A.’s work takes the form of sound, billboards, and T-shirts. The commission is designed to circulate publicly, forcing spectators to take a step back from the networks as they know them, demanding a re-e amination of the long and farreaching effects of techno-capitalism on the environment and the day-to-day- lives of the global majority. Their manifesto moves, floats, freezes, drowns and grows, creating spaces for the intersectional voices they platform.
text by: Brenna Horrox
DNA
Homepage and multimedia installation 11. Berlin Biennale
Daad Gallie
with Neda Sanai and Anita Beikpour
Title: Hydrocapsules.love
Year: 2020
Location: Daad Gallerie, Berlin
Media: Homepage, t-shirts, posters, events
LINKS:
hydrocapsules.love
11.berlinbiennale.de
https://11.berlinbiennale.de/participants/fcnn breathing-bodies-of-water
https://11.berlinbiennale.de/documentation/breathing-bodies-of-water
Hydrocasules brings FCNN’s members Anita Beikpour and Dina El Kaisy Friemuth together with artist and music producer Neda Sanai. Proposed as a space both digital and physical, this new project functions as an ecofeminist organism of different collaborations and conversations specific to non-white voices. Instead of reaching out to be rejected, tokenized or stepped over, the project organizes, takes ownership, and creates communal agency. In this case, the collective is a feminist strategy that cancels the singular artist model as a producer of finished art commodities. In a time when IRL gatherings have to reorganize, Hydrocapsules. love interrogates how a message can be shared. Even as we move fast and face the uncertainty of in-person reunion, depth can come through as a slogan. It is not only words describing a meaning but the combination of the object, the words, and the placement. Reading cyphers, music sharing, t-shirts, posters, and zines can all be vehicles for coming together. Traces of these encounters can be seen in a kind of concept store display. During Hydrocapsules.love, participants and guests will not refuse comfort for each other, tracing avenues to exist beyond the canons of capitalism, whiteness, and colonialist cultural inheritance.
Text by Amelia Bande
FCNN
News Platform Aros
Title: FCNNNews
Year: 2018-2020
Location: Aros, DK
Media: Homepage, three Hd-videos 15min
Participants: Anita Beikpour Lil B., Christian Music, Dina El Kaisy Friemuth
LINKS:
FCNNNews is an alternative news platform and curatorial project initiated by Feminist Collective With No Name (FCNN). The project uses the format of a television news program as a tool of subversion – critiquing and questioning who has the power to speak and who is being heard.
Since its formation in 2016, the collective is an active voice in the public debate about sexism and racism in Danish arts and has appeared in various newspapers, radio, television, and blogs. FCNNNews is a continu- ation of this practice where we in collaboration with artists, filmmakers, activists, and curators, intervene in the homogenous landscape of the Western-centric culture industry. In 2018 FCNNNews has been longlisted for the VISIBLE award.
SPECULATIVE BITCHES
Performance
HAU Hebbel Am Ufer
Title: Speculative Bitches
Year: 2022
Location: O-Overgaden, DK
Participants: Nuray Demir, Joanna Tischkau, Neda Sanai
History is written. Thus certain powerful mythical figures get downgraded into marginal figures in adventure stories about heroic men, reconfigured as “sluts” or “shameless whores.” All that remains of Baubo, who in Greek mythology saved humanity by exposing her vulva, is merely the grotesque caricature of a witch. Historical cult sites and symbols of a once matriarchal society are systematically destroyed, even today, as happened recently to the temple of Ain Dara in Afrin. Resisting this (rapid) forgetting, in her HAU production Nuray Demir, along with others from performance, visual art and music, will transform HAU3 into a feminist performative archive and at the same time an assembly room. Goddesses, human heroines, rituals, and ges- tures will be reassembled and interwoven into choreographic reincarnations. The joint speculation about everyday cultural practices and social roles will ultimately give rise to new myths. “The bitches are present.”
ANOTHER DINNER RUINED
HD Video
Title: ANOTHER DINNER RUINED
Year: 2018
Duration: 23 min
Participants: Dina El Kaisy Friemuth, Anita Beikpour, Lil B. Elsy Hajjar
Another Dinner, Ruined documents a dinnerparty with a group of queers based in Beirut. The group meets to kill the joy which these situations so often demand. They discuss call out strategies, share killjoy stories and gossip about everyday sexism. Together they have build a round table and created a safe space, where they can discuss and share stories of suppression. However, killjoys are not afraid of ruining the good atmosphere nor having the wrong tone! Tears and fights are part of the conversation.
Event
Skaane Kunsthall, 2019
whats-left-from-my-heart
FCNN will confront us with the possibilities and roots of rage, slicing apart respectability and so-called Nordic exceptionalism. One day before the opening, they will gather with invited guests for a dinner that will sever through the politeness, separate words from their pretence, and condemn the consequences of privilege. The dinner table, the traces of words flying in the air will remain in the gallery as an installation, referencing both Sara Ahmed’s writings and the experience of each dinner guest.
Text By Simona Dumitriu and Tawanda Appiah
