VIDEO

Here you will find a selection of Marianna's experimental video works exploring surrealism, memory, and multimedia storytelling. Marianna has exhibited her video work internationally in various film and video festivals. She collaborated with her husband Daniel on over 50 independent films as actress, scriptwriter, editor, sound designer and producer.

Incantation for Dead Avant-Gardes (14min, 2024)
Live Music: Daniel O'Reilly
Projection video: Mohsen Elbelasy
Video & Performance by Marianna Magurudumian-O'Reilly
The video is ncorporating live footage from the opening night of the performance for Surrealism centenary and Echoes of Contemporary Surrealism exhibition at Andre Breton House, St Cirq-Lapopie, France.

Ritual (14min, 2024)
A dance video in which a circle of women enact a Dionysian rite - part ecstatic dance, part collective incantation - channeling the Maenads’ mythic energy. Here, as throughout Studio Grotesque Exhibition (2024) for which this video was made, Magurudumian-O’Reilly stages transformation as both a personal and communal act: a shedding of skin, a merging with animal and mineral, a porous negotiation between the visible and the imagined.

THE FLIES Video Series

"The sound of their wings is like a roaring furnace." J-P Sartre, The Flies

The Flies video series began as a video response to Sartre’s play of the same title, in which his philosophical idea that “one is condemned to be free” is transposed onto the ancient Greek tragedy of Electra and Orestes. In the play, two opposing outcomes of action emerge: Electra, remorseful and devoured by the Furies (the flies), and Orestes, who affirms his deed through his own morality - “There’s no power to make me atone for an act I don’t regard as a crime.” If one accepts the logic of remorse, the act itself becomes negated, already dead, and the Furies swarm like flies feeding on the irreversible.

In this video series, the Flies haunt the fragmented body. Their call awakens dismembered characters, giving them voice.

In Meta Morph (5 min, 2011) remorse and denial manifest through the mouth — an insatiable void that consumes the surrounding world, silencing it.

In 28 (4 min, 2011) the body fuses with a mechanical system, transgressing the organic and identifying with the inorganic.

In The Protest (4 min, 2011) the submissive voice transforms through the recognition of Choice (in Sartre’s sense), reasserting itself as an active force. Here, the Furies fall silent, stripped of their power as negating agents, and a new hierarchy emerges.

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