The films of Wael Shawky's Cabaret Crusades are on view at MoMA PS1 until August 31, along with installations of selected sketches, sets and marionettes that the artist used throughout filming. For directions, schedules and other information, consult the MoMA PS1 website. For the viewer going into the films with little or no knowledge of the medieval Crusades and Jihads, see these Four Brief Yet Crucial Turning Points of the Crusades and Jihads for better understanding the Cabaret Crusades films.
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Historical analogies aside, if every potential or active Jihadi and Crusader, or any other member of a terror cell, insurgency or militia, whether politically Left, Right or Center, would watch Wael Shawky's Cabaret Crusades before joining the cause, or before setting out for the day's objective, they might very well turn around and walk away without ever again picking up a Kalashnikov or wiring plastique. Shawky's films may be about the numbing terror and depraved inhumanity of the medieval Crusaders and Jihadis, but the human players and objectives are virtually the same today. Through the transparent veneer of temporal, regional, ideological correspondences of history to the present, Shawky cuts to the nerve of life as a guerilla, as a terrorist, as a conventional warrior, universally, eternally. Terrorists, guerillas, rogue soldiers beware: there is no one you can trust after that first strike. No solace after the massacre. No divine intervention saving you from retaliation on earth, heaven or hell. Members of ISIS, Army of God, al-Qaeda, Sovereign Citizen, Hezbollah, Hammerskns, Muhjadeen, Antibalaka, Hamas, Sovereign Citizen, Orange Volunteers, Aryan Nations: Attention. Watch Cabaret Crusades, see your own vainglorious, narcissistic social pathology, then put down that detonator, walk away from that dirty bomb, forget today's scheduled ambush, tear up that terror tract, vent your rage with Grand Theft Auto or Postal, even become an artist who disrupts complacency, expectations. But never, never look back without knowing you will be maimed by your own cruelty. Cabaret Crusades is telling us, we, all have the capacity for annihilation if motivated enough by injustice.
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Within the first few minutes of The Secrets of Karbala, the audience arrives at a brief yet revelatory pastoral scene where two groups converge. It is only a small number from either side to be seen on the screen, but the subtitles translating the classical Arabic inform us we've arrived at the spontaneous beginning of a late 11th-century pogrom waged by Christians against Jews somewhere in or near France. Although the film, like the entirety of the trilogy of Wael Shawky's Cabaret Crusades, is the story of the first four Crusades waged by Christians against Muslims in Palestine and Syria that begin in 1095 CE (487 AH in the Muslim calendar) and the Jihads that greet and eventually repel the Crusaders by 1204 AD (600 AH). Shawky includes this fleeting episode of what is actually a continuation of the centuries-long crusades against heretical and pagan faiths in Europe. Such pogroms were as frequent as the ratio of Christians to Jews or Christians to nature worshippers allowed, and the waves of persecutions rippled throughout Christendom well after the Renaissance. What is distinctive about this particular pogrom is that it is waged by followers of Peter the Hermit's People's Crusade on route to The Holy Land, in what is the true first crusade in Asia that precedes the Papal First Crusade by a year. Without a royal or ecclesiastical chaperon to rein in their baser instincts, the People's Crusade was a genocidal melee that accumulated upwards of 20,000 poor Christians in the name of the defense of their true faith and its shrines while killing thousands of Jews on the way to Jerusalem -- the place they looked forward to confessing their sins.
Although it is far ou
The Secrets of Karbala by Wael Shawky, HD video, 2015.
Historical analogies aside, if every potential or active Jihadi and Crusader, or any other member of a terror cell, insurgency or militia, whether politically Left, Right or Center, would watch Wael Shawky's Cabaret Crusades before joining the cause, or before setting out for the day's objective, they might very well turn around and walk away without ever again picking up a Kalashnikov or wiring plastique. Shawky's films may be about the numbing terror and depraved inhumanity of the medieval Crusaders and Jihadis, but the human players and objectives are virtually the same today. Through the transparent veneer of temporal, regional, ideological correspondences of history to the present, Shawky cuts to the nerve of life as a guerilla, as a terrorist, as a conventional warrior, universally, eternally. Terrorists, guerillas, rogue soldiers beware: there is no one you can trust after that first strike. No solace after the massacre. No divine intervention saving you from retaliation on earth, heaven or hell. Members of ISIS, Army of God, al-Qaeda, Sovereign Citizen, Hezbollah, Hammerskns, Muhjadeen, Antibalaka, Hamas, Sovereign Citizen, Orange Volunteers, Aryan Nations: Attention. Watch Cabaret Crusades, see your own vainglorious, narcissistic social pathology, then put down that detonator, walk away from that dirty bomb, forget today's scheduled ambush, tear up that terror tract, vent your rage with Grand Theft Auto or Postal, even become an artist who disrupts complacency, expectations. But never, never look back without knowing you will be maimed by your own cruelty. Cabaret Crusades is telling us, we, all have the capacity for annihilation if motivated enough by injustice.
A pogrom on the Crusader route. The Secrets of Karbala by Wael Shawky, HD video, 2015.
Within the first few minutes of The Secrets of Karbala, the audience arrives at a brief yet revelatory pastoral scene where two groups converge. It is only a small number from either side to be seen on the screen, but the subtitles translating the classical Arabic inform us we've arrived at the spontaneous beginning of a late 11th-century pogrom waged by Christians against Jews somewhere in or near France. Although the film, like the entirety of the trilogy of Wael Shawky's Cabaret Crusades, is the story of the first four Crusades waged by Christians against Muslims in Palestine and Syria that begin in 1095 CE (487 AH in the Muslim calendar) and the Jihads that greet and eventually repel the Crusaders by 1204 AD (600 AH). Shawky includes this fleeting episode of what is actually a continuation of the centuries-long crusades against heretical and pagan faiths in Europe. Such pogroms were as frequent as the ratio of Christians to Jews or Christians to nature worshippers allowed, and the waves of persecutions rippled throughout Christendom well after the Renaissance. What is distinctive about this particular pogrom is that it is waged by followers of Peter the Hermit's People's Crusade on route to The Holy Land, in what is the true first crusade in Asia that precedes the Papal First Crusade by a year. Without a royal or ecclesiastical chaperon to rein in their baser instincts, the People's Crusade was a genocidal melee that accumulated upwards of 20,000 poor Christians in the name of the defense of their true faith and its shrines while killing thousands of Jews on the way to Jerusalem -- the place they looked forward to confessing their sins.
Although it is far ou
