Mona Marzouk
Renewal, 2017
Site-Specific Mural
Collection of the Artist

About the work:
In 2015, Mona Marzouk created a series of eight murals at Villa Romana in Florence, the city from where the Medici once rose to power, the formidable ruling dynasty of Renaissance Italy and the potent patrons of a new era in art. She used iconography developed by artists working under Medici patronage as a source for her own imagery. She took the family’s Latin motto and translated it into English for her title: Renewal. But, Marzouk’s murals also scratch at something underneath the grand Medici myth: the banal reality that is the coarse pursuit of power.

Across her oeuvre, Marzouk has sought to limn the power structures that arch over and undergird our daily lives. Her meticulously delineated, polyphonic collages are rooted in extensive research—historical research, often, though Marzouk does not see history as a fixed subject, but a container of concepts and patterns that recirculate and reshuffle. Power was firmly in the grip of the privileged few in Renaissance Italy; Renewal might remind how authoritarian fists still wrest power over the people today. Artists re-brokered their understanding of themselves and the world during the Renaissance; entering this unpredictable twenty-first-century, we too may sway in confusion as we question even what it means to be human.

But history doesn’t repeat itself—it only rhymes. It’s hard to find the right words to accompany Marzouk’s abstract grammar, but her abstractions may help us picture our own re-brokering with reality and help us picture something new beyond the horizon of the past.

Alexandra Stock (based in Cairo, Egypt)