MARIANNE FAHMY deploys past and current narratives into potential futures that oscillate between fiction and reality. Through her video, photography, sculpture, and mixed media works, she takes on the role of a new historicist, using parafiction to deconstruct the social and political issues of the present. Myths and prophecies mix with histories of peoples, cities and languages, creating an atemporal space where Fahmy charts a new cartography of identity and emotion.

Visually illustrated with found and archival material, as well as images of the artists’ own making, Fahmy’s films deconstruct identity through metaphors of topography. An environmental urgency underscores her works, with seascapes and deserts appearing as recurrent symbols; as vast no-man’s lands where nationalism can be reinvented, or portents of an inescapable future fate.

From the diaries of an Egyptian oceanographer aboard a research vessel, to documents pertaining to an abandoned railway station in Alexandria, the artist approaches archival materials as objects ripe for reimagination. Architecture, in particular, acts as a medium for her engagement with marginalised narratives. A dialogue between separated lovers appears as a conversation between buildings on Alexandria’s narrowing streets of faded splendour, as if the utterances were spoken by the decrepit structures themselves.

Her work borrows from the Deleuzian notion of fabulation, employing fiction and imagination to invent a future people or nation. This seemingly fanciful modality bypasses current material realities, challenging the deep-seated structures that dictate the shape of the present. In its place, Fahmy presents us with an amorphous, shifting future that questions the authority of the sciences used in the past to achieve dominance and control over landscapes.