How to be Fabulous?

by Mohammad Shawky Hassan

“Fabulous” is a term that has long been associated with being eccentric, flamboyant, stylish, extraordinary and more often than not “queer.” While it has acquired various meanings over the years, whether as a celebratory term within queer communities or a derogatory homophobic insult; its etymology also signals a departure from regimes of truth, a triumph of the imagination and a creation of mythical, unorthodox or dreamlike worlds that might have no basis in reality. 

The works in this program are created by fabulators: resourceful storytellers who, through minimal - often laconic - use of moving images and inventive play with text and sound, question dominant modes of video production and consumption, unsettle heteronormative approaches to audiovisual storytelling, imagine alternative futures and fabulate histories that could have been.

Mohammad Shawky Hassan is an Egyptian filmmaker, writer and video artist living and working in Berlin since 2019. His video “And on a Different Note” was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York as part of its permanent collection in 2016, and his first feature-length film "Shall I Compare You to a Summer's Day?" premiered at the Berlinale Forum in 2022. He is currently a visiting lecturer at Humboldt University’s Center for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies. 

With moving image works by Sarah Francis, Nadine Khan, Kinda Hassan, Sido Mohamed Lansari, Leil Zahra Mortada, Akram Zaatari, Ateyyat El Abnouby, Sofía Velázquez Núñez, Jasmina Metwaly, and Michael Robinson.