Interview by Thomas Roueché
Portrait by Sohrab Golsorkhi-Ainslie

TR What inspired your recent work?

AM The genocide has made me ask how art can be useful. One of my favourite pieces is called “Just Tell Them it’s an Artwork”, and it’s half a floor of empty space where an installation would be. I took the $30k fee and donated it to families in Gaza. The ability to do that and call it “art” is one of my favourite aspects of being an artist. I also run a mutual aid network in Egypt for people who have evacuated from Gaza, paying their rent, buying medicines, and connecting them with doctors and therapists. I made a film with a Palestinian rock band that I joined, Osprey V, shot between Gaza and Cairo. I use the museum to find an intersection between material support and cultural production.

TR Are most of your new works about the genocide?

AM The others are still in the vein of negation and negativity. Even the mutual aid work, where I take the money and present instead an empty space, is formally part of a larger project. I made another film in 2019 with some workers at the port of Beirut, complaining about their bosses. It became quite explicit, and afterwards they asked us to delete it all, and I agreed. No film exists. Now there’s an installation about the lack of film, about what isn’t there. There’s another one about redacted speech, about how lack and loss can be a form in itself, and what we can do with that negative space. Even the film with the band is called Inaudible, referencing Palestine’s voicelessness in the global discourse. It stands in relation to the missing testimonies of the port workers.

TR You are North American and you live in Egypt. How does it feel being caught between these places?

AM In Egypt, curators often get imprisoned for exhibitions. It is so urgent to talk about politics in art, but the ramifications are so severe. Abstraction becomes so important; you can jeopardise a lot of people by being explicit. In many Western contexts, politics become aestheticised through art, but in Egypt it is the opposite. We want a politicisation of aesthetics, rather than an aestheticisation of politics. We want to use form to smuggle messages.

TR It reveals the limitations of the political aesthetic. You receive all of the images yet it still feels invisible. There are limits to what representation can do.

AM That’s what’s so hard about working on this film in Gaza – I am very much against using art as a vessel for representing violence, because it transforms it into spectacle and commodity. It sickens me to see catastrophe become a metric of value. That has been something I struggle with: making sure the film’s aesthetic sensibility is not at all exploitative. But on the other hand, Gazans want people to see what is happening there. They want to show catastrophe. A lot of my own artistic assumptions have been challenged, and I have had to find the middle ground between what I believe is a political necessity for contemporary art, versus their desire to document reality. It has been a big awakening. I don’t necessarily have an answer to it.

TR It is sobering to watch those images being met in influential parts of the world with such blasé. It’s not just about seeing, but about engaging and connecting with.

AM I think that’s really shaped what the film is about. No matter how much you see the images, nothing will get done about it. We can’t demand that of art anymore. One thing that I think surprises people – they’re not surprised that people are dying – is that people are actually still living, making art and music and taking risks. There was definitely a point where I thought, “What’s the point of making art during a genocide?” I don’t feel that anymore, because after spending time working with Palestinian artists in real life, I saw that art often matters more to them than anything. They are so tired after two years where the only goal has been to not die. That has totally changed my entire relationship to art, by seeing that it can also be life-producing.

TR Did you engage with similar themes in your earlier work?

AM Most of my previous work is about shipping. This has been a great moment to contextualise. They seem very different – shipping on the fourth floor and Gaza on the fifth – but the sixth floor connects them. I made a world map based on port workers’ solidarity. It’s nothing to do with geographical proximity, but affinities towards a cause or a group of people. There’s historically never been any greater cause for port stoppages than Palestine. Workers will refuse to unload Israeli ships, completely halting the supply chain. That has been the main point of this decade-long research project: everything is held together by transnational infrastructure. People assume it’s naive to think we have any power against the global system, but the supply chain is a great way to forge solidarity and agency. Supply chains’ greatest threat is their own workers.

TR There was a video that went viral of a young Houthi pirate, and part of what was attention-grabbing was his human scale against the vastness of the ship and shipping itself.

AM Despite Yemen’s role in stopping Israeli-complicit ships, most piracy is not narrativised as political resistance. Many Western countries used the shores of Somalia for illegal fishing and toxic waste dumping for decades, completely annihilating an economy reliant on water. That’s where the “pirates” came from – they’re political activists trying to defend themselves. I spent a couple months living on a container ship that went from Singapore to Istanbul, through Somalia and Yemen and the Red Sea and up the Suez Canal. That’s part of the exhibition. There is a huge history of ships being used as a means of transnational amalgamation, but now it has become much more regimented, often only one nationality per ship. It is very intentional, to prevent community as much as possible. Historically, the ships rewrote what connectedness could look like: an organic, bottom-up form of transnational identity. Covid-19 revealed alot about shipping; there was the crew change crisis where all the ships had to continue moving to sustain the global economy, and if one stopped it would be a threat to national security. Eight hundred thousand workers couldn’t leave the ships because the borders were closed, but they weren’t getting paid because it was beyond their contract. It was slavery. People can get away with anything when they’re outside borders. Our entire global economy relies on this legal loophole. .