This book brings together Wael Shawky’s most accomplished and mature series, Cabaret Crusades and Al Araba Al Madfuna, for the first time.

Today, the relationship between art and politics is more crucial than ever, and the volume Crusades and Other Stories is significant for its production of knowledge, new perspectives, and reflection through shared sensibilities about our contemporary time of unrest and uncertainty.

Wael Shawky works with an original visual language in video, drawing, and performance that draws on histories of oral storytelling and recreation. In so doing, Shawky opens a foundational debate that explores the construction of history universally to look at how narratives of the past are controlled and rewritten in order to define present and future understandings of the world.

Adopting a vocabulary of theatre and cinema, and mixing forms of aesthetics and production, Wael Shawky’s films are performances of the reconstruction of well-known and sometimes disputed tales, myths, and legends that interrogate human histories as creative spectacle. Child actors in the series Al Araba Al Madfuna and hand-crafted marionettes in the Cabaret Crusades trilogy intentionally exaggerate the meaning of the roles they play in a statement on the theatricality of existence.

Text in English and Arabic.