Manar Moursi
2023 Harold and Arlene Schnitzer Prize in the Visual Arts
More about the artist
The Loudspeaker and the Tower
Mixed media: metal sculpture with sound and light, mechanized zoetrope installation, ceramic mask, 30-minute documentary. (2019 – ongoing). Primary solo exhibition co-presented by Trinity Square Video and SAVAC during the Scotiabank Contact Photo Festival (Toronto, May 2019). Kenderdine Art Gallery, University of Saskatchewan (Sasakatoon, 2020) Forrest City Gallery, (London, Ontario, 2021) Artspace, (Petersborough, 2022) Jossa by Alserkal, (Dubai, 2022).
Supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture, the Toronto and Ontario Arts Councils, an Al Serkal Foundation research grant, and the Council for the Arts at MIT.
The Loudspeaker and the Tower is a long-term research art project structured around an inquiry into the material and political significance of new mosque architecture in Egypt today. Through an immersive environment constructed of colored lights, megaphones, masks, videos, photographic images, and sculptures, the works present multiple considerations to the viewer: What if singular patriarchal voices of religious sermons were interpreted through mime? How do residents of Cairo challenge authoritative architectures and urban master plans while creating new meanings for public space and land use? What are the environmental and political impacts of these physical acts of defiance through habitual practice? What do these biographical networks of Cairo reveal in terms of the complexities and contradictions present in everyday practices in the city?
The show consists of several pieces. Ring Road Night Drive is a zoetrope that replicates Moursi’s circular movement on the ring road that wraps around Cairo, showcasing the minarets’ lighting at night in an animation. The Parrot performance video, developed in collaboration with dancers At2uta and Shady Abdelrahman and sound designers Kinda Hassan and Karine Dumont, refers to folk stories about imitation, intelligence, and freedom from the binds of repeating as embodied through the figure of the parrot. Meanwhile, the 30-minute documentary video Stairway to Heaven sets the context for the show using interviews with the various stakeholders around the new mosque development, including architects, mini developers, brick makers, light designers, and Al-Azhar sheiks. All the while, it showcases images and soundscape that Moursi documented from the ring road and the micro-environments around the mosques. The Tower sculpture is another essential element of the show. Built to replicate one of the metal structures Moursi encountered on the highway, this sculpture was activated every Friday throughout the show with performances by artists from Toronto who work with sound and poetry relating to sound.
In a recent iteration of the show in Dubai, Moursi presented the research material and process involved in the making of her forthcoming artist book. News from Home Towers is an installation with newspapers that includes some of the hundreds of photographs captured in the research phase of The Loudspeaker and the Tower. These newspapers were produced in collaboration with publisher and designer Georg Rutishauser from Edition Fink (Zurich).
Learn more about the project:
Review in CMagazine, Sep 2019
To Feel Close, Sep 2020
Manar Moursi’s The Parrot, 2019. 4:37min, Video (still). Concept and directing by Manar Moursi. Choreography and performance by Shady Abdelrahman. Mime actress: Ataouta. Photographed at Studio Venise, Cairo. Courtesy of the artist and Trinity Square Video, Toronto.
Manar Moursi’s The Loudspeaker and the Tower. The Parrot mask, ceramic mask. Installation image, College Art Galleries, 2020. Photographed by Carey Shaw. Courtesy of the artist.
Manar Moursi’s The Loudspeaker and the Tower. Detail of the Tower sculpture. Installation image, Trinity Square Video, 2019. Photographed by Yuula Benivolski. Courtesy of the artist.
Manar Moursi’s The Loudspeaker and the Tower. Installation view of the Tower sculpture and the Parrot video. Installation image, Trinity Square Video, 2019. Photographed by Yuula Benivolski. Courtesy of the artist.
Manar Moursi’s The Loudspeaker and the Tower. Installation view with the Parrot and Stairway to Heaven at Jossa by Al Serkal, 2022. Photographed by Derick Rodriguez. Courtesy of the artist.
Manar Moursi’s The Loudspeaker and the Tower. Detail showing CRT monitor with live video footage from the inside of Ring Road night drive zoetrope. Installation image, Trinity Square Video, 2019. Photographed by Yuula Benivolski. Courtesy of the artist.
Manar Moursi’s The Loudspeaker and the Tower. News from Home Towers at Jossa by Al Serkal, 2022. Photographed by Derick Rodriguez. Courtesy of the artist.
Manar Moursi’s The Loudspeaker and the Tower. Stairway to Heaven, 2019. 30min, Video (still). Directed by Manar Moursi. Installation image, College Art Galleries, 2020. Photographed by Carey Shaw. Courtesy of the artist.
Everything that remains to be lived
Performance video, 2022.
Commissioned by and part of the Off-Site: Liquid Ecologies open archive research project and website, 2022. Exhibited at the group show Stories of Water, Chapter Four: Wounded and Healing Waters at On Curating, Zurich, March 2023. Also supported by the Harvard CMP program.
The golden age of Egyptian bathhouses was during Ottoman rule. According to some historical accounts, Cairo had more than 137 bathhouses. There are only four fully functional hammams remaining from this time. Almost a century before Egypt, Bulgaria was also occupied by the Ottomans, an occupation that lasted 500 years, yielding multiple hammams.
As a prompt for the Off-Site project, Moursi received three stones from an Ottoman bathhouse in Bulgaria that is no longer in use. Left to time and no longer maintained, this bathhouse is slowly transforming into a site of ruin. She decided to bathe with these stones as pumice: rubbing her body as embalming, dissolving the stones’ minerals into her pores, and mixing stones with rolls of her dead skin.
Moursi performed this ritual of embalming and bathing in the hammam known as Malatili or Margush in Cairo, which dates from 1780 and is said to have been established at the time of an Ottoman wali, Ismail Pasha. The second site where she chose to perform is the site of an Ottoman Cairene bathhouse, the Tambali Hammam, which recently collapsed.
The resulting work is a two-channel video from the two locations. Through the repetitive rubbing, this gesture of bathing sits on the threshold between care, wearing away, and wound.
There are political differences as to why Ottoman bathhouses have fallen into a state of ruin in Bulgaria and Egypt in their condition of purgatory and decay, not wholly erased nor in use, sitting uncomfortably between life and death. The ones that remain have in common the power to evoke past worlds, ghosts of masons, of architects, of vaults and pools of water, of bodies massaged and bodies massaging, of rubbing, dead skin, and steam.
Manar Moursi’s Everything that remains to be lived, 2022. 15:09 min, Video (still), Directed, performed and edited by Manar Moursi. Videography by Esraa Elfiky. Courtesy of the artist.
Manar Moursi’s Everything that remains to be lived, 2022. 15:09 min, Video (still), Directed, performed and edited by Manar Moursi. Videography by Esraa Elfiky. Courtesy of the artist.
Manar Moursi’s Everything that remains to be lived, 2022. 15:09 min, Video (still), Directed, performed and edited by Manar Moursi. Videography by Esraa Elfiky. Courtesy of the artist.
Manar Moursi’s Everything that remains to be lived, 2022. 15:09 min, Video (still), Directed, performed and edited by Manar Moursi. Videography by Esraa Elfiky. Courtesy of the artist.
Mummy Issues: I am not your Mummy
Mixed Media: Performance, performance video and forthcoming artist book, 2019 – ongoing. SOMA, Mexico City, 2021.
Supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.
Over the summers of 2019 and 2021, Moursi staged the performances Mummy Issues: Part 1: I am not your Mummy in Mexico City. The work gestures to recovering the heritage of Egyptian mummies from colonial framings and countering assumed gender roles for mummies as mothers.
Video documentation of the performance shows Moursi wrapping and unwrapping herself in packing tape like a mummy. Moursi chose packing tape because of its use in fixing things in Mexico City, and because the sound reminds her of her multiple moves over time. She also chose it because it is difficult to remove, a risky and potentially harmful process at the end of the performance as the X-acto knife comes close to her neck, eyes, and face. Moursi speaks to the tape’s use for healing and repair, but she also tries to access and convey feelings of pain and risk of harm. Undoing the binding speaks of a refusal of the position of resource that mummies—as mothers and as mummified relics/bodies—are expected to assume.
During her 2021 residency in Veracruz, Moursi encountered an informal collector who exhibited archeological artifact in his home for visitors. She discovered that informal collections are common in Mexico. She photographed his collection and wrote a text that works through preservation issues, informal collections vs. state-held ones, of objects—Mexican and Egyptian—exported to institutions worldwide.
Mummy Issues: Part 2: Platanos y Momias is the second chapter in her series on mummies produced as an artist book. It asks: If artifacts spoke, what would they say? Could informal collections better conserve and make this heritage accessible to their native communities? Through a collection of texts and photographs, Moursi recounts intimate stories of objects, collectors, and exhibition spaces that house them. She also discusses Egyptomania, the early nineteenth-century Western obsession with Egypt. At SOMA, her installation included a draft of this artist book, the two-channel performance video, a pyramid made of edible orejas de elefante, and her photography of the artifacts from the informal collection.
Learn more about the project
Part I: I am not your mummy
Part II: Platanos y Momias
Manar Mousi’s Mummy Issues: Part 1: I am not your Mummy. 19:44 min, Video (still), Directed, performed and edited by Manar Moursi. Videography by Su Yu. Courtesy of the artist.
Manar Mousi’s Mummy Issues: I am not your Mummy. 19:44 min, Video (still), Directed, performed and edited by Manar Moursi. Videography by Montserrat Cattaneo. Courtesy of the artist.
Manar Moursi’s Mummy Issues: Part 1: I am not your Mummy, 17:00 min, Installation view at SOMA. Photographed by Rocio Guerrero. Courtesy of the artist.
Manar Moursi’s Mummy Issues: Part 1: I am not your Mummy. 17:00, Video (still). Directed, performed and edited by Manar Moursi. Videography by Harold Vazquez. Courtesy of the artist.
Manar Moursi’s Mummy Issues: Part II: Platanos y Momias, artist book. Photographed, written and edited by Manar Moursi. Courtesy of the artist.
Manar Mousi’s Mummy Issues: Part II: Platanos y Momias, artist book. Photographed, written and edited by Manar Moursi. Courtesy of the artist.
Your Can’t Get Blood from a Stone
Multi-channel video, 2020-ongoing. La Verdi, Mexico City.
Supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.
You Can’t Get Blood From a Stone is an auto-fictional epistolary video work consisting of voice-over narration of exchanges between Manar Moursi’s ex-partner and her father. Mixing archival visual material—own and found—the video reflects on the effects of structural violence on women’s lives against the backdrop of the 2011 uprising in Egypt. This effort to make the private public through the video-work is a fight against shame and gestures to the continuous work of forgiveness towards oneself and others. This work is ongoing and under development.
Manar Moursi’s Your Can’t Get Blood from a Stone, 2021. 20 min, Video (still), Directed, written and photographed by Manar Moursi. Courtesy of the artist.
Manar Moursi’s Your Can’t Get Blood from a Stone, 2021. 20 min, Video (still), Directed, written and photographed by Manar Moursi. Courtesy of the artist.
Manar Moursi’s Your Can’t Get Blood from a Stone, 2021. 20 min, Video (still), Directed, written and photographed by Manar Moursi. Courtesy of the artist.
Manar Moursi’s Your Can’t Get Blood from a Stone, 2021. 20 min, Video (still), Directed, written and photographed by Manar Moursi. Courtesy of the artist.
Manar Moursi’s Your Can’t Get Blood from a Stone, 2021. 20 min, Video (still), Directed, written and photographed by Manar Moursi. Courtesy of the artist.
About the Artist
Manar Moursi is a Kuwait-born Egyptian-Canadian researcher, architect, and artist. Moursi studied architecture at the University of Virginia and Princeton University. Her artistic work comprises the fields of installation, performance, photography, artist book, and writing. It explores tensions in the built environment, particularly in public spaces, and draws from her architectural training.
Manar Moursi has presented work in venues across the Middle East, Mexico, Canada, and Europe. In addition to her art practice, Moursi is pursuing a PhD in Art and Architectural History, Theory, and Criticism at MIT. Her recent artistic explorations reflect her research interests in feminist theory, new materialism, sensory atmospheres, and decolonization.
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