The year was 2015 and the place was the Küçük Mustafa Pașa Hammam, built in 1477 under the reign of Mehmet the Conqueror, in the Fatih district of Istanbul. I was there to interview Wael Shawky, the Egyptian artist, ahead of the opening of the 14th Istanbul Biennial. At the hammam, he was presenting a wildly ambitious film installation, matched with architectural props and sculptures, for the last installment of his trilogy “Cabaret Crusades,” inspired by Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf’s book The Crusades Through Arab Eyes. Shawky’s films tell the story of the First Crusade, started by a call of Pope Urban II in 1095 to conquer the Holy Land, and which ended in defeat against the armies of Saladin a century later.
The third piece in the trilogy, “Secrets of Karbala,” is a two-four film, performed not by real actors but rather hand-blown marionettes, adding an element of universal drama that can exist only in myths. Yet the film’s plot is everything but fictional. It begins with a scene from the Battle of Karbala, in 680, between Shia and Sunni Muslims, and then moves back to the 12th century of the Crusades. The artist’s intention wasn’t only to dispel the notion of the Crusades as a clash of civilizations between the West and “others”—the central theme of Maalouf’s narrative retelling of the Crusades, which draws on the contemporary accounts of medieval Arab chroniclers to portray the Crusaders’ barbarity and give voice and agency to Arabs. Shawky also set out to question the authorship of modern history by adopting the popular format of the puppet theater, which goes back to the Ottoman Karagöz and Hacivat shadow plays. With the puppets, the artist could create a surrealistic atmosphere, blending drama and history, while also critiquing how history itself is told. That extends to the language of the film, spoken only in classical Arabic, even by the Western characters.
The effect was to make us wonder who really controls fate. Although Shawky’s film had been shown in some of the world’s most prestigious museums—and would soon open at MoMA PS1 in New York, for his first solo exhibition at a major American museum—in Istanbul it hit differently. When I spoke to Shawky, our conversation centered on the vanishing Greek heritage of Istanbul, the long-term violence of displacement, and the possibility of total war in the region, all of which he experienced in Egypt, in his home city of Alexandria. The writing on the wall was there in Istanbul. Turkey was heavily involved in Syria’s civil war, supporting armed rebels and hosting millions of Syrian refugees. But hate speech against migrants and refugees, especially Syrians, was brewing, amid a wave of terrorist attacks, from both Kurdish militants and ISIS. Photographer Mathias Depardon, who was there at the hammam that day to photograph Shawky’s installation for the Biennial and take portraits of the artist, would be arrested two years later while on assignment in eastern Turkey, accused of “propaganda for a terrorist organization,” and deported.
