Sophia Al-Maria’s ‘Virgin with a Memory’

Virgin with a Memory is a multimedia exhibition documenting the production of, and inspiration behind, Sophia Al-Maria’s unfinished rape revenge film Beretta. What Al-Maria compiles from the film, using video installations, film posters, and even her personally annotated scripts, makes for a compelling and multifaceted insight into what could have been. It also draws comparison between Al-Maria’s own frustrations at attempting to get the film off the ground and her anger at the harassment of women in Egypt—where the film is set—alongside a thought-provoking critique of the depiction of women in the media on a wider scale.

Al-Maria’s exhibition starts and ends with confronting the issue of the male gaze; upon entering, you are met with Rape Gaze and Torture Trip, two pieces in which Al-Maria draws attention to the deeply unsettling fetishisation of violence towards women in Egyptian film posters of the 1960s and 1980s. Al-Maria continues upon this theme of making the male voyeuristic experience of women in culture an unsettling one by naming a compilation of Arabic music videos Your Sister. She thereby constructs the sexual exploitation of females in the media and makes it appear sordid and incestuous, something that, arguably, we are almost numb to in the modern age due to the recurrent depiction of female sexuality through a male lens in the music industry. For me the most fascinating part of the exhibition was The Watchers No. 1 – 6, a piece showing visually distorted images of men of different ages with staring eyes that seem to follow you around the room. This powerfully illustrates just how intimidating and frightening being the object of predatory masculine sexual desire can be.

As well as providing a powerful critical evaluation of the phenomenon of the male gaze, however, Virgin with a Memory acts as Al-Maria’s celebration of being an artist finally able to salvage something meaningful from Beretta and those tumultuous three years, plagued with financial and legal issues troubling the film’s pre-production. One piece in the exhibition is simply a box of published copies of the novelisation of the script that retains Al-Maria’s unabridged vision of the film. This seems to represent Al-Maria revelling in being able to have her voice heard without the interference of producers, legal teams and other administrative, stifling influences, making the fact that the exhibition has been allowed to take place an intrinsic part of the exhibition itself.

Al-Maria’s ability to bring together a stylistically diverse exhibition, with her all-encompassing use of lighting, sound, and especially video pieces, delivers a coherent and impressive work—needless to say it is an impressive feat in itself. The combination of content that explores, on the one hand, one woman’s struggle to get her artistic vision realised, coupled with the reactionary ‘call to arms’ against the way in which women are exploited and depicted by men, is a truly unique and inspired one that you are unlikely to come across elsewhere. This makes Virgin with a Memory a truly distinctive and stimulating piece that is well worth taking the time to immerse yourself in.

Virgin with a Memory is on display at Manchester Cornerhouse until 2^nd November.