Born to a a Polish mother and an Egyptian father, Jasmina Metwaly is a Cairo-Berlin-based artist and filmmaker, member of Mosireen Collective and of media archive 858.ma. She works in video and film, and has recently started drawing again. She likes to work with people and their histories, within different materials including texts and archival matter such as: scripts, drawings, lectures, manuals and images.
Rooted in performance and theatre, her works focus on process-based practices, that have a social effect through which generates tension between participants and audiences. Taking a position of an onlooker/ story- teller, she investigates the ways in which images transgress, how the role of the person behind the camera changes with stories, and how these impact collective memory. Her work is process based, scrutinizing the methodology of the making itself, of how images are collected and archived and how they can take on new meanings when de-constructed from their primal intention. She is interested in how stories create stories, blurring the preconceived boundaries between documentation and fiction.
Metwaly’s work has been exhibited at international art venues and festivals including Townhouse Gallery in Cairo, IFFR–International Film Festival Rotterdam, Sfeir-Semler Gallery and Berlinale Forum Expanded. From 2010 till 2015 she collaborated with filmmaker Philip Rizk. Together, they co-curated the program 'How to Act: On Stages and Storytellers', in Beirut and in Cairo. In 2015, their feature-length film 'Out on the Street', was presented in the German Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale and at MoMA within the exhibition 'Films from Here: Recent Views from the Arab World'.
In 2017 Metwaly was artist in residence at the DAAD in Berlin. For 2019/2020 she received a grant from Mophradat as part of Consortium Commissions programme. The year thereafter, she and her sister Kamila Metwaly were awarded the Berlin Senate Artistic Research Grant for their project 'Voice of the Wind is Not a Metaphor' which consisted of various encounters, workshops and performances and concluding with an installation piece "Visitations". In 2022, Jasmina Metwaly was a fellow at the Villa Romana in Florence.