On Friday May 12, curators, art collectors and politicians gathered at sunset in the small amphitheater of the Pompeii Archaeological Park, the Piccolo Teatro Odeion, for the premiere of the first work of contemporary art created in situ and presented on site: Wael Shawky’s new film I am Hymns of the New Temples.
The event launched the historic site near Naples as a stunning new venue for contemporary art. The ancient city of Pompeii, buried under volcanic ash in AD 79 during the violent eruption of Vesuvius and rediscovered in 1748, is known as a popular tourist magnet of an archaeological site. Today it is also the latest addition to the growing Italian landscape of cultural heritage institutions that commission and exhibit contemporary art.
Launched at the end of 2020, Pompeii Commitment is a one-of-a-kind program set up by the Archaeological Park of Pompeii and the Italian Ministry of Culture that is committed, as its name suggests, to presenting new ways of contextualizing the ruins of Pompeii, a UNESCO World Heritage Site with 2.5 million visitors a year. The program recognizes the site as a rich source of inspiration and material for contemporary artistic endeavors that has gone largely untapped.
Andrea Viliani, creator and co-curator of “Pompeii Commitment: Archaeological Matters”, at the Archaeological Park of Pompeii. Photographer: Amedeo Benestante. Courtesy of Pompeii
The initiator and co-curator of Pompeii Commitment is the visionary Andrea Viliani, who is also responsible for leading the Newly reopened Museum of Civilizations away from its problematic colonial heritage and towards a radical and progressive engagement with its collection. Viliani previously ran the Madre Museum in Naples, the contemporary art museum for the southern Italian region of Campania, where Pompeii is located, and had already begun laying the groundwork for the Pompeii initiative during his tenure there. .
Active since its creation in 2020, the contemporary art program Pompeii Pledge has so far introduced several digital contributions from artists, including Anri Sala, Alison Katz, Rose Salane and Miao Ling, with grants and upcoming digital productions from Legacy Russell, Formafantasma and Sissel Tolaas in the pipeline.
“You are about to see a masterpiece,” gallery owner Lia Rumma told me earlier this afternoon during a small gathering at her Naples art residence overlooking the islands of Capri and Ischia. The seasoned dealer has worked with Egyptian artist Wael Shawky since 2018 and supported production in Pompeii.
More I am Hymns of the New Temples by Wael Shawky. Photo: Hili Perlson
Sébastien Delot, director and curator of the LaM museum in Lille, France, also intervened to tell me that he was not going to pass up the opportunity to be involved in the new production of Shawky: , I raised funds additional. The movie about an hour I am Hymns of the New Temples will be shown at the contemporary art museum in Lille later this year. Carlolyn Christov-Bakargiev, director of the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea and the Fondazione Francesco Federico Cerruti in Turin, arrived at lunch with a literal crash, as a sudden gust of wind rose from the Tyrrhenian Sea and blew up the front door. , shattering its milky glass panels just as she entered.
Christov-Bakargiev is largely to be credited as the curator who brought Shawky’s ambitious practice to a wider audience when she included the first of her three-part epic Cabaret Crusades in Documenta 13, of which she curated in 2012 in Kassel and Kabul. There, and in the following two chapters, Shawky presented events and traditions related to Egypt and the Middle East while challenging the intractable contrasts of the narratives – for example, looking at the Crusades from a vantage point. Arab historiographic view and using puppets to represent historical figures.
More I am Hymns of the New Temples by Wael Shawky. Photo: Hili Perlson
The new job I am Hymns of the New Temples continues to research Greek and Roman mythology and how it corresponds and overlaps with the cults and traditions of ancient Egypt. After all, not only were temples dedicated to Greek and Roman gods excavated at Pompeii; the temple of Isis, dedicated to the Egyptian goddess, with all its stuccoes, states and frescoes, was discovered there in the 17e century.
As the sun slowly set behind the ruins and guests including collector Nicoletta Fiorucci, artist Adrian Paci and his wife Melissa, and politicians such as Massimo Osanna, chief executive of all public museums run by the Italian Ministry of Culture, were taking place in the old stone theater, Viliani and Christov-Bakargiev invited Shawky to talk about the film until the night got dark enough to start the screening.
“I wanted to cut out the acting,” Shawky said when asked if he used puppets in past works and elaborate masks in this new production. Here, Shawky uses real actors, but all wear ceramic masks designed by the artist and made by the ceramist Pierre Architta and the workshops of the San Carlo Theater and the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples. To complement the sumptuous and fantastical appearance of the characters, Shawky imagined costumes made from ancient San Leucio silks and other fabrics made by historic Italian textile manufacturers.
More I am Hymns of the New Temples by Wael Shawky. Photo: Hili Perlson
The film, which occasionally turns into a musical, is narrated entirely in Arabic and takes viewers through a swirling shortened fable about gods, titans, giant cyclops, demigods and men. The colorful, almost psychedelic scenes filled with magical figures and animals were shot on location in the Little Odeon, the Praedia of Giulia Felice, the House of the Orchard, the Nocera Gate Necropolis and the Basilica, the Temple of Genius Augusti, and the Temple of Isis. There is also a hippopotamus and a crocodile, in reference to the Nile wall paintings found in Pompeii which feature the semi-aquatic animals. It’s a story of creation that ends, much like the site that inspired it, with a natural disaster.
“I question history, myths and stories as human creation,” Shawky told me after the screening. “My films always try to put everything on top of each other and deal with it, not in a cynical way, but in a very serious and precise way. Not in the sense that you’re actually going to believe the stories, but you’re going to believe them and question them at the same time.
One of the many myths he attempts to unpack with this work is the common understanding of Pompeii in the Arab world as a type of Sodom and Gamora that was destroyed as punishment and rediscovered as a warning to us all. “For most Muslims or the Arab world, they look to Pompeii as the example of the city of sins,” he added. “It is not part of the Islamic mentality, but it is part of the Quran that there were many other cultures that fell into sin and corruption and were destroyed by God. This is one of the stories I want to challenge here.
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