I Am Hymns of the New Temples
Pompeii Commitment. Archaeological Matters
May 12–14, 2023
From May 12 to 14, 2023, the Small Theatre “Odeion”—one of the theaters of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii—is hosting the international preview of the new film work by the Egyptian artist Wael Shawky (Alexandria, Egypt, 1971) I Am Hymns of the New Temples. The screening première will be introduced by a conversation between the artist, Andrea Viliani, curator of the project, and Carolyn Christov Bakargiev—Director of the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art in Rivoli-Turin—introduced by Gabriel Zuchtriegel, Director of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii.
The production of the work—winner of the public notice PAC—Piano per l’Arte Contemporanea 2020, promoted by the Italian Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity—is the result of the collaboration between the Italian Ministry of Culture and the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, in the context of the programme Pompeii Commitment. Archaeological Matters co-founded by Massimo Osanna and Andrea Viliani.
I Am Hymns of the New Temples represents the first artwork produced in the context of this programme dedicated to the formation of a contemporary art collection for the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, the first archaeological site in the world to launch a long-term contemporary art programme and a collection aimed at enhancing Pompeii as a contemporary framework, able to initiate new lines of artistic enquiry on the themes of “cultural heritage”, in the multiple and potential today’s sense of this expression.
A narrator of processes of knowledge and expression, half way between the documentable and the imaginable, Shawky explores the ways in which stories have been written and told and analyses how these have also shaped historical reality. In his works—which mix film, drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, performance and theatrical direction, and which are always the result of research into historical and literary sources—Shawky places us in a position of awareness of the ancient and contemporary narrative mechanisms used to interpret and transmit historical, social and cultural facts and, crossing time and space, evokes a both factual and imaginary dimension of history, society, and culture, as if they could never be defined once and for all, or only from one point of view.
Filmed in the summer of 2022 among the ruins of ancient Pompeii, struck by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD and therefore the witness of the impermanence as well as the continuous transformation not only of matter but also of stories, Shawky’s new film shows what rises to the surface of the different cultures that make Pompeii an authentic theatre of different yet inevitably connected narrations. Basing his own narration on Greek and Roman mythology, and telling how they overlap with ancient Egyptian cults, Shawky recreates the stratifications of ancient stories, and how these have contributed to shaping plural relationships between history and myth. Already a source of wonder for the modern western Grand Tour, and the object of continuous discoveries—still in progress today—since it was rediscovered in 1748, the archaeological findings in Pompeii are a cultural as well as natural ecosystem open to metamorphosis and interpretation, a multiverse of both narrative and historical potential, and bear witness to the complex stratification of Mediterranean cultures and natures: ancient Pompeii, a busy trading site, was indeed home not only to temples linked to Greek and Roman but also multiple other religions (the Temple of Isis was uncovered, with all its stuccoes, statues, frescoes, precisely at the start of the Grand Tour). Capturing the traces of these syncretic and multispecies iconographies, Shawky identified the mobile set of his filmic work moving between Giulia Felice’s Praedia, the Casa del Frutteto, the Odeion, the Necropolis of Porta Nocera and the Basilica, the Temple of Vespasiano (Genius Augusti) and the Temple of Isis.
LaM-Lille Métropole Musée d’art moderne, d’art contemporain, d’art brut is the partner institution for the international valorisation of the work. Two other Italian institutions, Fondazione Teatro di San Carlo and Academy of Fine Arts of Naples, have also collaborated in the realisation of the work, with the support of Galleria Lia Rumma, Milan/ Naples.
For further information on Pompeii Commitment. Archaeological Matters, please contact:
Lara Facco P&C, T +39 349 2529989 / press [at] larafacco.com
