Wael Shawky: Al Araba Al Madfuna III

A hundred tonnes of sand form a rolling landscape in Den Frie’s underground exhibition space, Minus 2, combining with clear sky-blue walls as the backdrop for Wael Shawky’s captivating film work Al Araba Al Madfuna III, where myth, fact and fiction intertwine in a narrative of human endeavour.

Egyptian artist Wael Shawky (b. 1971) is a strong storyteller. Building on extensive research, he links personal experiences and sociological analyses with historical and literary sources. The resulting dynamic gives rise to dense and powerful film works that frame historical themes in a contemporary context, while offering perspectives on current conflicts through a historical lens.

Al Araba Al Madfuna III is set in and around Al Araba Al Madfuna, a village in Upper Egypt. The starting point of the work is Shawky’s personal experiences of the villagers’ relationship with the nearby archaeological site of Abydos. Once a religious centre in pharaonic times, Abydos is now a tourist attraction and source of income for local residents. The very objects and sites that once catalysed religious endeavour are now commodities with tangible economic value. This shift between divergent strategies of endeavour – one religious and one materialistic – is also the core theme of the short story The Sunflower (1983) by Egyptian author Mohamed Mustagab (1938-2005), on which the manuscript to Shawky’s film is based.