For April’s Video of the Month, we invited our Young Canada Works Intern, Fiona Enright, to select something she had seen from the hundreds of videos she has watched and catalogued over the past several months. Here’s what Fiona has to say about her choice:
“Poetic and sensorially rich, Maha Maamoun’s Shooting Stars Remind Me of Eavesdroppers transports viewers to a resplendent day in Cairo’s al-Azhar Park. Amidst the ambient hum of urban life, the rustle of wind through greenery, and the careful movements of egrets, a couple navigates intimacy and truth through a conversation on eavesdropping. The video opens with a cosmic allegory of ever-watchful stars, evoking the transgressive and voyeuristic dimensions of listening in on others. It implicates the viewer in the very transgression it contemplates, raising the question of whether we might be punished by the cosmos for our own eavesdropping.”
Shooting Starts Remind Me of Eavesdroppers
Maha Maamoun (Egypt, 2013, 4:45, Arabic w/English subtitles)
Maha Maamoun is an Egyptian video artist, photographer, curator and publisher based in Cairo. Her videos and photographs often address the form and function of images that are found in mainstream culture, acting as a lens through which we see familiar images in novel and insightful ways. She makes subtle interventions in photographic material that she captures on camera or borrows from various sources: through an unusual crop, a seamless edit, an odd juxtaposition, an incongruent photomontage, a staged remake, Maamoun shakes up our expectations and toys with our perceptions.
With a keen eye for the absurd and a dark sense of humor, Maamoun’s work pulls on emotional, psychological and cerebral strings. She has been known to reflect on generic and overused national symbols and the ways in which they have been appropriated to construct personal narratives and collective histories. Since 2007, she has completed a succession of projects that take as their starting point the Pyramids of Giza as a visual and literary image
