Finissage

Das sagt der/die Veranstalter:in:

We warmly invite you to the closing event of the exhibitions of Melanie Jame Wolf, Manar Moursi, Margarita Athanasiou, Sara Wu, Jia-Jen Lin and Steinunn Önnudóttir at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, featuring a varied afternoon program including an exhibition tour, artist talks, and film screenings.

Program:

2:00 PM – Exhibition Tour with the Artists

A guided tour through the exhibition provides a chance to engage directly with the participating artists and gain deeper insight into their works. Through conversations in front of the artworks, artistic strategies, thematic backgrounds, and collective resonances are brought to light.

3:30 PM – Screening and conversation with Manar Moursi, Elodie El Hossaini-Sacher and Nada El Kouny (Library)

We will screen Manar Moursi’s work-in-progress film A Funeral at the Edge of Drought (11 min), exploring the severe impact of drought on the Moroccan Tighmert Oasis, followed by a conversation with cultural researcher Elodie El Hossaini-Sacher (A.MAL Projects) and sociocultural anthropologist Nada El-Kouny.

Filmed in Morocco’s Tighmert oasis, this piece sets women’s mourning songs alongside interviews, family photographs, and slow tracking shots of desiccated date palms. As villagers recall how monoculture farming and rising heat emptied their irrigation channels, the film stages a metaphorical funeral for a landscape in collapse—bearing witness to the parallel displacement of human and non-human communities when water, labor, and memory run dry.

The conversation will reflect on wider regional patterns of ecological collapse, migration, and Indigenous water practices, drawing from Elodie El Hossaini-Sacher’s and Nada El-Kouny’s work on climate justice, collective infrastructures, and extractive economies across North Africa.

5:00 PM – Screening and conversation with Margarita Athanasiou and Jorgina Stamogianni (Library)

The multilayered, poetic essay film Voices (43 min) merges autobiographical footage with found material, historical documents, and interviews. It is both a personal exploration and a media-archaeological study. Drawing on childhood experiences with her mother as a collaborator, Athanasiou traces a “spiritual family tree” across generations, technologies, and belief systems. The film centers on female-identified bodies and their connections to immaterial entities—as spaces of transformation, intimacy, and resistance. Through dense, collage-like visuals, Athanasiou reflects on how spiritual practices evolve and are reshaped through technology. Voices uses channeling as a metaphor for transcending individual experience, collective memory, and alternative knowledge forms—raising important questions about authorship, presence, and control in an increasingly disembodied world.

Afterward, we look forward to a conversation with the artist and curator Jorgina Stamogianni (Centrum, Callie‘s), followed by an open discussion on the themes of spirituality, technology, memory, the body, and voice.

We look forward to welcoming you for an inspiring afternoon together.