Yumna Al-Arashi is a Yemeni Egyptian American artist. Born and Raised in Washington, DC, Al-Arashi has worked independently as an artist with a focus on the image in the fine arts, documentary, and commercial sectors in North America, Europe, and the MENA region. Her practice focuses on how images shape the way we perceive the world around us. As an Arab-American woman born and raised in the United States, her interest in photography was sparked by the limited visual narratives in Western media post-9/11. Her work spans various mediums, while always staying rooted in the critical reflection of image making. Yumna’s work has been supported by MoMA PS1, The International Women’s Media Foundation, CIRCA Prize 2024, The National Portrait Gallery London, and The Arab Fund for Arts and Culture. Her upcoming monograph, Aisha, will be published by Edition Patrick Frey in Autumn 2024.

HOW IS YOUR WORK INFLUENCED BY THE CIRCA 2024 MANIFESTO?
rage is a work about the importance of collectively expressing and honouring rage as an emotion vital to surviving a perpetually uncertain world. The work draws upon historical rituals of bodily expression such as Tarantismo, the feminine “hysteria” which afflicted women in southern Italy, or mosh-pits, the collective dance of punk and metal shows. When we think about somatic healing, we often think of softness, but what about the hard? What about the trance, the shaking, the pushing and screaming of a collective exorcism that heals us and always has?

This 2.5 minute excerpt, scored by artist Kelsey Lu, is a glimpse into the longer unpublished audio-visual work. Filmed in Zürich with over 100 participants, the work creates an engulfing intensity, evoking both heaven and hell. A timely series of images reminiscent of Botticelli’s depictions of Dante’s Inferno, or The Garden of Earthly Delights, are brought back to the joy and suffering of humanity. The images, filmed at 800 frames per second, capture the softness of every detail of human interaction within a contained space.

In a world where we are collectively confronting unprecedented amounts of uncertainty, we must also reimagine the ways in which we come together interpersonally in order to build community, to heal trauma, and to reimagine the world we coexist within. rage opens the door to an imaginary, questioning the limits and boundaries of our expression, of our fears as well as our desires. Can emotions be released from the binary and constraints of themselves? And could this unlock potentials for the ways in which we move through a world of adversity? There is no breaking free into a future without the honouring of an unknown, without the dissolution of definition, without gesturing into the miraculous. When a mass of 100+ people come into space, without a certainty that their bodies could conclude a specific outcome, we begin to embody a freedom through a trance which is at once supported by one another and yet open to everything all at once.

WHAT WOULD YOU CREATE/DO WITH THE £30K CIRCA PRIZE?
The next steps of rage require it to occupy a physical space in order for it to achieve its full potential. Currently, we have over 70 hours of footage to continue working on in order for it to become an audio visual experience. Having produced the work until this point fully without a large budget to support it, I hope for the prize money to facilitate a larger presentation rage, with a capacity to compensate collaborators and display the work within an installation.

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