Please notice that this event has been rescheduled to 10th of June! We stand in solidarity with Black Lives Matter Helsinki March (location: Helsinki Cathedral, Unioninkatu 29) starting 5pm on Wednesday 3rd of June!

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On 10th of June at 5pm you are warmly welcome to join us for the launch of Trials and Trails (2020), at the windows of PUBLICS (Sturenkatu 37–41 4b). The work can be viewed from outside so feel free either to pass by or stay for the outside gathering with drinks.

Newly commissioned for PUBLICS’ four street level windows in Vallila, Mona Marzouk’s Trials and Trails is a hand-painted mural redeploying selective images from earlier paintings. The artist’s meticulously painted assemblages combine fragments from diverse image archives. The work engages with the transparency of the large public facing windows, the spatial depth of glass, its reflective surface, and its materiality.

With vibrant colours and distinct semi-industrial aesthetics, ancient weapons, agricultural tools, and infrastructures of surveillance intersect with the contemporary worlds of finance, court cases, and public legislation to create hybrid representational forms and emblematic objects. Trials and Trails, gathers divergent histories of language, law, struggle, labour and social injustices together and reprocesses them as compressed symbolic images and abstracted narrative forms.

Trials and Trails is the second of PUBLICS window-sited public art commissions. THIS IS FINLAND (2019) by Hlynur Hallsson was exhibited throughout the autumn of 2019, and co-commissioned with OsloBiennalen. In September 2019, PUBLICS commissioned Mona Marzouk to make a site responsive work based on the artist’s series Renewal and Trayvon, and this was shown as part of the Today Is Our Tomorrow collaborative festival.

Mona Marzouk (Born Alexandria, Egypt – Lives Helsinki) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts, Düsseldorf in the late 90s and has been widely exhibited. Solo exhibitions include: BARK, Gypsum Gallery, Cairo (2018); RENEWAL, Villa Romana, Florence, Italy (2015); Trayvon, Gypsum Gallery, Cairo (2014); The Bride Stripped Bare of Her Energy’s Evil, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, (2008); The New World, Art in General, New York and Townhouse Gallery, Cairo (2006). Selected group exhibitions include: The Wisdom of visual memory contemporary art production with traditional substance, Ottoman Cannon Factory building, Istanbul (2020); Very Sustainable–Environmental Revelation, MOCA, Museum of Contemporary Art, Yinchuan, China (2017); Terra Mediterranea in Action, NiMAC, Nicosia (2017) and HALLE 14 – Centre for Contemporary Art, Leipzig (2016); EVA International, Ireland’s Biennial, Limerick (2014); The 11th Havana Biennial, Havana (2012); Second World, Steirischer Herbst, Graz and Galerija Nova, Zagreb (2011); 7th Gwangju Biennial, Gwangju (2008).