Martin Heidegger and Marwan Bassiouni
15 December 2019 - Published on marwanbassiouni.com
Marwan Bassiouni, Prayer rug selfie no196, 24 Nov 2019, published on instagram profile @marwan_bassiouni
"The essay considers the photographic work of contemporary artist, Marwan Bassiouni, under a phenomenological lens. On the 31st May 2017, Marwan Bassiouni posted a picture on his Instagram profile captioned “Prayer rug selfie no1 #selfie #prayerrugselfie”. The photograph seized a moment in Bassiouni’s daily routine where his prayer rug laid on the floor of a photographic studio, with the shooting screens and spotlights disposed around it, casually as they were. Prayer rug selfie no.1 would initiate the series of snapshots which features today two-hundreds selfies collected on Bassiouni’s profile over the last two years.
The essay firstly analyses Bassiouni’s Prayer Rug Selfies as a personal phenomenological archival, exploiting the functions of his private Instagram profile: the images own all that is required from an authenticated artwork – the record of a date, a registered location, the title, and the sign of their author. Then, the argument moves onto discussing New Dutch Views as an attempt of spreading such epistemological quest onto a social level. Photography will be questioned around its adequacy as a phenomenological tool. The philosophical grounds to the argument are drawn exclusively from Martin Heidegger’s theory and aesthetics: this is purely on the basis of the evident affinity between Bassiouni’s artistic engagement with his personal condition of practicing Muslim in the contemporary West, and Heidegger’s notions of phenomenological “abundance” and postmodern artistic revolution."
