Schibah, Nils, Katrine

Amin Zouiten´s art project Grand Tour consists of two film works: the short film Vom Nil shot on mobile phones along the Nile in Egypt, and Schibah, Nils, Katrine - a silent black and white film of a solitary camel living on Öland. Both works draw from two historical points and examines depiction in relation to travel narratives. Art Initiative is screening Vom Nil on lill-skärmen (in the north corridor on the groundfloor) and Schibah, Nils, Katrine on the big screen in the atrium.

A Grand Tour was a 17th- to 19th-century custom in which wealthy young European men in their early twenties traveled through Europe for months or years after university, typically accompanied by a guide - a cicerone. Italy was a key destination. The purposes were to experience classical art and architecture, learn languages and diplomatic etiquette, make connections, gain understanding of different societies, and to collect items.

In Schibah, Nils, Katrine a lone camel appears on black-and-white 16mm film, situated beyond any specific geography or time. The scene was shot on Öland’s alvar with the camel Katrine, who lives in captivity on Öland, and serves as an allusion to David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl’s (1628–1698) painting Camel with Driver from 1688, which depicts the animal (Schiba) and its attendant (who was taken to Sweden along with the camel, and later forced to change his name to Nils) in a landscape reminiscent of a fantasized Saharan topography. The Ehrenstrahl painting can be seen at Drottningholm Castle, it is thought to be the first depiction of a Muslim in Swedish art history. It was inspired by an event in 1687 when the Swedish Count Nils Bielke brought with him a dromedary and its Ottoman keeper to Sweden after the Battle of Mohács in Hungary. Investigating Ehrenstrahl’s decision to situate his subjects within this orientalist landscape, Zouiten was led to a near-identical painting by Jan Asselijn (1610–1652) – a Dutch painter contemporary of Ehrenstrahl – portraying a solitary camel. A connection which in turn inspired the 16mm film where the figure is omitted, mirroring Ehrenstrahl’s gesture of displacement through its geographical shift to the Alvar: a location with strong connotations to Swedish landscape painting of the 19th century.

Film Crew Schibah, Nils, Katrine: Cinematographer: Christine Leuhusen, Assistant of the Director: William Dalenson Oros, Producer: Victoria Wocalewski

David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl’s (1628–1698) painting Camel with Driver from 1688, depicting the animal (Schiba) and its attendant (who was taken to Sweden along with the camel, and later forced to change his name to Nils) in a landscape reminiscent of a fantasized Saharan topography.

In Vom Nil (on Lill-skärmen), the camera returns to the sites originally photographed by Queen Victoria of Baden (1862–1930), one of Sweden’s first amateur photographers. In Vom Nil, the periphery of these well-documented historical sites are reshot and reformulated for an estranged 21st century.

Amin Zouiten (born 1994) is a Swedish-Moroccan artist and filmmaker, educated at the Malmö Art Academy and Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna. In his cinematic and site-sensitive works, he looks at how places can be sensorially charged through stories and myths that are reproduced over time and connected in associative geographies. His work examines meanings, thought patterns and processes, opening up penetrating interpretations at the skewed intersection between past and present. In 2024, he was a Bernadotte scholarship recipient at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm. His works and films have been shown at venues including the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts, Skåne Art Society, Gothenburg Film Festival, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Malmö Konsthall, ISSUES Gallery, Stockholm Film Festival, Rencontres Paris/Berlin, and Uppsala Short Film Festival.

Art talk:
Amin Zouiten will come to the school for an art talk lunchtime on December 2. More info and sign up here.

Amin Zouiten x 2 
The screening of Schibah, Nils, Katrine and Vom Nil is part of the Filmprogram x2 curated by Anna-Karin Larsson and Andreas Bertman at Filmform. The Filmform program will be screened throughout the fall at SSE, and it is a program showing two films by the same artist during the same month - one on the big screen in the atrium and one on lill-skärmen in the north corridor on the groundfloor.