Manar Moursi’s exhibition at Künstlerhaus Bethanien investigates the lingering residues of colonial and environmental violence across multiple scales—bodily, ecological, historical, and personal. Through video, performance, sculpture, installation, and collaborative workshops, it explores how landscapes and bodies carry embedded histories of exploitation—not as passive traces but as forces actively shaping the present. Ecological violence here is inseparable from colonial histories and ongoing neocolonial projects of land governance, labor exploitation, and bodily regulation. Ritual, storytelling, and collective making assert resistance as a refusal of erasure.

At the heart of the exhibition is Severed Ground, an installation where amputated fabric limbs are woven together with rubble, dried plant matter, and embedded mini projectors playing Everything that Remains to be Lived, evoking the entanglement of bodily trauma, ecological destruction, and the residues of historical violence. The installation makes tangible how displacement operates across scales: how drought mirrors human dismemberment and ecological ruin echoes forced migration and war. Projected onto debris, the videos do not merely document loss, but insist on presence, refusing to let these histories disappear beneath the forces of neglect, urban renewal, and speculative development. To find an expression for this, the artist physically interacts with the ruins of Ottoman hammams in Cairo. Of the more than 137 hammams that existed, once places of communal care, only four are still operational today. The Malatili Hammam (built in 1780) and the recently collapsed Hammam el-Tambali serve not as preserved monuments but as fragile, material witnesses to cycles of maintenance, abandonment, and destruction. In Malatili, the artist bathes with stones from an Ottoman bathhouse in Bulgaria,—offered to her as a curatorial prompt during a collaborative project with local curators. These stones are rubed against her skin in a gesture that is both preservation and dissolution, exertion and care. In Tambali, where the structure has begun to disintegrate, the stone is used as a drawing tool, tracing the cracks, textures, and remnants of its collapsing surfaces. These gestures mirror the slow disintegration of the bathhouses themselves, transforming the act of bathing into an ephemeral form of inscription. The demolition of historic hammams today reflects the accelerating pace of infrastructural and speculative development in Cairo—initiatives that prioritize economic growth at the expense of historical preservation and lived urban continuity.

On the wall opposite, the artist juxtaposes the videos Rainbow Moon alsongside Summer, God, Rain. These works engage with the Balkan Peperuda rain ritual. Exploring themes of fertility and cyclical renewal, they emphasize the role of women in ecological care and natural cycles. Rainbow Moon situates the Peperuda ritual within Berlin’s landscape, where droughts have intensified since 2018, leading to groundwater depletion. The video unfolds in two channels: one documenting the tactile making of the Peperuda costume from plants and its ritual engagement with Berlin’s dry terrain; the other presenting a slowed-down sequence of the artist at Treptower Park’s fountain, underscoring water’s transformative force. The choice of Treptower Park—a site of Soviet-era monumental architecture in the former East Berlin—connects the work to Bulgaria, which, like East Germany, was part of the Eastern Bloc. Here, Peperuda becomes an invocation—not only of rain, but of an alternative way of relating to land, memory and change. The ritual becomes a way of making visible what is often unseen: the slow violence of ecological change and the quiet acts of care that resist it. Summer, God, Rain, performs the Peperuda ritual in front of the now-abandoned bathhouse in Sliven, evoking a symbolic return of wetness to a place long dried out.

Alongside this, the artist places the video Rivering Together that emerged from a workshop at Dar Bellarj in Marrakech, exploring the political dimensions of water distribution and the city’s relationship with the Ourika River. Water is portrayed as a resource, a ritual space, and a site of transformation, resistance, and healing—viewed through a feminist, decolonial lens. Participants exchanged personal experiences, engaged in discussions on ecological justice, and contributed to a collective zine featuring narratives, botanical knowledge, and reflections on water scarcity. Superimposed over these images is another visual layer: a drawing of an amputated limb, evoking both bodily trauma and the violent severing of landscapes through war and environmental devastation—echoing themes found in Manar Moursi’s poetry. A fragment of a dead palm tree nearby further reinforces the themes of fragmentation and loss, becoming a stark symbol of ecological destruction and displacement,.

For the artist, ecological violence is not an isolated event; it is embedded in broader systems of control. Colonial projects have long reshaped landscapes, water systems, and ecosystems as tools of governance, extraction, and dispossession. This entanglement is further examined in the video A Funeral at the Edge of Drought, which explores the severe drought impacting the Tighmert oasis in Morocco due to industrial monoculture farming. Interweaving oral histories, rituals, and landscape footage, the work reveals how capitalist agriculture and climate change have displaced both human and non-human communities

Presented for the first time, Blue-Black Liver is a collection of texts excavating what lingers beneath the surface—what saturates the body, the land, yet refuses silence. Interweaving poetic reflections with theoretical inquiries, it examines how colonial violence, ecological destruction, and bodily resistance are interconnected. Here, ecology is not an abstraction, but something lived and weaponized: soil cracked by war, water withheld, poisoned, or redirected, demolition dust thick in the lungs of those made to disappear. These texts insist that the personal and the environmental are inseparable. Through a poetics of refusal and persistence, they engage loss as not only a condition but as a site of reimagining and reclamation.

Manar Moursi’s exhibition asserts that history is inscribed in landscapes and bodies—not as static traces, but as residues that shape present conditions. Through storytelling, ritual, and collective making, these works foreground how environmental and colonial violence remain embedded in material and sensory experience. Yet they also reveal how landscapes and bodies remember, refuse erasure, and continually reclaim their presence. In doing so, they transform mourning into resilience, fragmentation into collective resistance, and the residues of displacement into sites of reactivation.