MOB: Blue-Black — Manar Moursi

Blue-Black Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, 2025

In my exhibition Blue-Black at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien (April–June 2025), I explore how colonial and environmental violence is etched into bodies, ecologies, histories, and personal memory—using video, performance, sculpture, installation, and collaborative workshops as form and method. At the center of the exhibition, the installation Severed Ground weaves sculptural limbs and rubble around my two-channel video Everything that Remains to be Lived, in which I engage Cairo’s crumbling Ottoman hammams—bathing with stones from Sliven’s ruined Ottoman bathhouse and tracing cracks in the collapsed Tambali—to transform care into inscription and expose speculative demolition rooted in colonial and neocolonial extraction. In Summer, God, Rain, I perform the Balkan Peperuda rain-calling ritual in Sliven, layering archival chants with new recordings and drawing Cosmic Lesions through an overhead projector. Rainbow Moon repositions Peperuda in Berlin’s parched Treptower Park fountain, linking Eastern Bloc histories to today’s drought. The accordion-fold zine Rivering Together emerged from a Dar Bellarj workshop in Marrakesh, where along with workshop participants we explored drought politics through stories, recipes, poems, songs, and botanicals. Blue-Black Liver, a folding “mock newspaper” of poetry and Jordan River archives, excavates how colonial violence and ecological harm saturate body and land. Nearby, a dead palm fragment and my video A Funeral at the Edge of Drought (on Morocco’s Tighmert oasis) stand witness to continued displacement. Through ritual, storytelling, and collective making, the exhibition insists on resistance and the refusal of erasure—and on the power of landscapes and bodies to remember, reclaim, and reimagine shared futures.

Exhibition designed with Rowaa Ibrahim. Photographs by Galya Feirman and Thomas Rush. Blue-Black is the culmination of a one-year residency at the Studio du Québec at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, made possible by the support of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Canada Council for the Arts.