Marionette no. 69, Cabaret Crusades: The Secrets of Karbalaa

This glass marionette is a character from The Secrets of Karbalaa, the third in Shawky’s film trilogy Cabaret Crusades (2010–14). Based on French-Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf’s book The Crusades Through Arab Eyes (1983), the film follows the military campaigner Salah El Din as power transferred from Shiite to Sunni hands in Egypt during the Crusades in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. In Shawky’s retelling, Muslims battle Muslims and Christians attack Christians, correcting the tendency to define this period solely as a confrontation between Islam and Christianity or East and West. The fantastical designs of Shawky’s marionettes are conceived from a variety of sources, including masks and other figurative works from sub-Saharan Africa from The Met collection. At times exhibited alongside the film and also shown as autonomous art objects, the sculptures blur conventional categories of identity and affiliation.