Jasmina Metwaly

Artist and filmmaker Jasmina Metwaly’s latest video installation considers the significance of military uniforms in Egypt since the 2011 revolution.

The artist and filmmaker Jasmina Metwaly’s (b. 1982, Warsaw, Poland) most recent project centers on the cultural signification of military uniforms in the aftermath of the 2011 Egyptian revolution. Commissioned as part of the Consortium Commissions, an initiative of Mophradat, in collaboration with the Hammer Museum, Anbar (2019) is a three-channel video installation with accompanying textile components. Here Metwaly considers the uniform as an emblem of the paranoia and anxiety that descended on Egypt in the years following the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak. The work is organized around three characters—a former conscripted soldier, a tailor, and an activist filmmaker—who each demonstrate particular ties to the Egyptian military. The tailor, for instance, dressed Mubarak and his successor Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, as well as the late military leaders Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat. Metwaly suspends her three characters in distinct yet porous narratives that reveal specific moments of revolutionary history not typically represented by mainstream news outlets. The videos employ various formal devices that intimate different approaches to filmmaking while showing the ways in which ideology and power are embedded into the folds of everyday life.