Programme
Exhibition.
Acts of Conflations
Agil Abdullayev (Frankfurt), Hüseyin Aksoy (Istanbul), Reyhaneh Mirjahani (Stockholm), Yasmin Noorbakhsh (London), Saayeh Sayyah (Tehran), Helena Tahir (Ljubljana), Yaqeen Yamani (Jericho Palestine), Abbas Zahedi (London) / collectives: Orta Okul and ZînKolektif
curated by Davood Madadpoor
September 13 – October 2, 2025
Berlin; Galerie AC. Art & Dialogue
On the occasion of Berlin Art Week, on Saturday, 13 September, Galerie AC. Art & Dialogue presents the exhibition Acts of Conflations, bringing together eight artists and two collectives selected from last year’s Sumac Open Call. It invited artists, curators, and research bodies who engage with contemporary urges in the socio-political circumstances of West Asia to submit their work and projects. The selection process was undertaken by an international jury consisting of Jonatan Habib Engqvist, Dr. Nat Muller, and Angelika Stepken.
Agil Abdullayev, Hüseyin Aksoy, Reyhaneh Mirjahani, Yasmin Noorbakhsh, Saayeh Sayyah, Helena Tahir, Yaqeen Yamani, Orta Okul, Abbas Zahedi, and ZînKolektif share a research thread on identity, memory, and socio-political struggle, exploring how personal stories connect with broader historical and cultural forces. Their work examines the layered nature of individual and collective identity, often drawing on family and cultural memory while also addressing the challenges faced by marginalized communities. They investigate physical and metaphorical spaces as places of conflict, negotiation, and resistance, questioning dominant narratives. At the heart of it all, what persists is hope and resilience—the quiet but unshakable force that carries these stories forward.
participatory installation.
Holding the Dilemma, Sitting with the Question
Reyhaneh Mirjahani
September 14, 2025
Berlin; Galerie AC. Art & Dialogue
For Acts of Conflation, Reyhaneh Mirjahani presents Holding the Dilemma, Sitting with the Question—a participatory installation that invites visitors to sit with discomfort, navigating the unstable ground between action and inaction, resistance and complicity. Drawing on lived experience, it considers how agency is shaped by hesitation, compromise, and constraint, and asks how we might account for more subjective and embodied understandings of agency. Rather than seeking resolution, the work opens a space to examine how we carry, negotiate, or refuse power within structures that limit our capacity to act.
FILM SCREENING.
Seeing & Being Seen: Female Gaze In Contemporary Azerbaijani Documentary Cinema
conceived by Aysel Akhundova
September 20, 2025
Berlin; Galerie AC. Art & Dialogue
Documentary cinema finds itself in a moment of transformation. Where once the form was bound by rigid notions of reality, or rather representing, it today’s practitioners embrace the personal, the lyrical, the speculative. They understand that reality itself is layered, that truth emerges not through distant observation but through intimate engagement, through what we might call the artist’s complicity with their subject.
This evolution has not bypassed Azerbaijani cinema, where a distinctly poetic voice has begun to reshape the documentary landscape. Here, women filmmakers approach reality with an empathy that transforms seeing into feeling, documentation into reflection. Their cameras move like hands tracing memory, and their narratives unfold like whispered confidences.
Exhibition.
Mind or Mend the Gap Merges Into Listening Into Hope
Amanda Bobadilla, Bianca Lee, Emma Lang, Nischal Khadka, Xiao Zhang, xindi
coordinated by Dr. Marianna Liosi
June 24 – 26, 2025
Berlin; Galerie AC. Art & Dialogue
A cooperation between M.A. Raumstrategien Kunsthochschule Berlin Weißensee, Sumac Space and Vereinigung für genreverbindende Kunstprojekte
Using the online platform as a space of transitions where boundaries blur, students from M.A. Raumstrategien/Spatial Strategies at Kunsthochschule Berlin Weißensee Amanda Bobadilla, Bianca Lee, Emma Lang, Nischal Khadka, Xiao Zhang, and xindi propose to the internet audience a trip.
A journey that goes from the Mind or Mend the Gap, the 3-day exhibition and performances that took place in June 2024, as an output of the seminar Mobilizations (SuSe2024), held by Dr. Marianna Liosi, to the Listening into Hope radio broadcast that was shown on the 9th of July 2024 at the Refuge Worldwide Radio, as part of Dr. Anton Kats’ seminar Great Sound (SuSe2024). With the participation of several practitioners in the radio broadcast Listening into Hope, new narratives, sensitivities, practices, and spaces of resistance emerge.
Public Programs.
Generative Encounters–A Five-Day Creation and Reciprocity
conceived by Amelie Conrad and Davood Madadpoor
September 13 – 17, 2023
Berlin; Galerie AC. Art & Dialogue
A project by Vereinigung für genreverbindende Kunstprojekte in collaboration with Sumac Space
supported by Bundesvereinigung Kulturelle Kinder- und Jugendbildung (BKJ)
The program encompasses several events: two pop-up group exhibitions (Home, Home, Home, Temporary Home and Farmers of God’s Universe Live by the Click), a book presentation (POSTPOSTPOST: Reflections on a New Avant-garde), a music performance (Mutaradim مُتَرَدِّمْ by Siska and Felix Claßen), Film screening & conversation with Clementine Butler-Gallie & Siska (Studio Baalbeck – An Emerging Lexicon), a three-day workshop in collaboration with the CoFUTURES research project (Science Fictionality: Training Workshop), and a conversation between Sumac Space (Davood Madadpoor), DAr. Design, Architecture, Research (Eliana Martinelli, Cecilia Fumagalli, Chiara Simoncini) and VgK-Art in Context (Amelie Conrad). As a closing event, you are invited to a culinary experience titled SabroSura Sabro: Flavorful Images of the Arab Caribbean, curated by the Instituto de Cultura Árabe de Colombia.
Exhibition.
Home, Home, Home, Temporary Home
Parisa Aminolahi, Vooria Aria, Fatih Aydogdu, Christine Kettaneh, Siavash Naghshbandi, Anahita Razmi, Sara Sallam
curated by Davood Madadpoor
September 13 – 17, 2023
Donaustraße 84, 12043 Berlin
Home, home, home. Temporary home, sublet home. Place with stuff that isn’t mine. I don’t know the contents of the boxes under the bed in which I sleep. I didn’t buy the sheets I use every night. The cat I share the bed with doesn’t know my name. Home, home, home. I get home. Claudia Pagès
The concept of the exhibition is rooted in my ongoing encounters with change and transformation, which I experienced during my stay in Europe. It began in August 2013, ten years ago, when I settled in a part of Italy, not as a local but as a voyager. After a decade of living in Italy, I decided to take on a new challenge: building a home that holds both physical significance and sentimental value—a place where my dreams can take root and live on. To me, the intent of building a home encompasses both the material structures and the intangible experiences, as well as aspirations for the future.
The exhibition explores the complex connotations of home, examining broader socio-political considerations and creating a constructed realm. This realm, perhaps, can only take shape in imagination. A place where constant changes and the swift passage of time have taken the place of contemplation, changes that not only render the concept of time unintelligible but also compel you to ask questions—questions that you carry even within the soil and structure of your home. The title is borrowed from Claudia Pagès’s book Rage, Home & Insults. _Davood Madadpoor
Exhibition.
Farmers of God’s Universe Live by the Click
Al Hassan Elwan, Assem A. Hendawi, Aarti Sunder, Rojda Yavuz, Shumon Basar, Y7
curated by Ruba Al-Sweel
September 13 – 17, 2023
Donaustraße 84, 12043 Berlin
“The analog clock imitated the circularity of the day, but digital timekeeping has no arms, no circles, no moving parts. It is a number, stationary in time. It just is. The tribal community lived in the totality of circular time; the farmers of God’s universe understood before and after; workers of the clockwork universe lived by the tick; and we creatures of the digital era must relate to the pulse. Digital time does not flow; it flicks. Like any binary, discrete decision, it is either here or there. In contrast to our experience of the passing of time, digital time is always in the now, or in no time. It is still. Poised.” Douglas Rushkoff in ‘Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now’
The image today moves differently. It moves with us, past us and between us. Through a click, a scroll, a flip. In our pockets, on the big and small screen. It’s stitched into the very fibers of our skin as we produce and reproduce projections of ourselves and the world. It flows alongside and against us as markets fluctuate and forces wax and wane. It travels upstream, downstream and everywhere else in between.
This capsule group exhibition presents moving image works by artists who utilize network and digital technologies as medium and material to look at value and time performed online and mediated through screens today. _Ruba Al-Sweel
Exhibition.
Zahra Zeinali. au-delà
curated by Davood Madadpoor
July 13 – August 30, 2023
Berlin, A:D: Curatorial
A:D: Curatorial is pleased to host Zahra Zeinali’s exhibition au-delà. The exhibition brings together a series of Zahra Zeinali’s paintings and Installations from the last three years for her first solo show in Berlin. The opening of the exhibition follows the Meditation on Sound and Thoughts by Anton Kats.
In au-delà, Zahra Zeinali uses the prism of her experiences as an Iranian immigrant to examine themes of exile, displacement, and trauma. She employs it to explore the sensations and memories of loneliness and vulnerability, expressing the agony and concussion of being uprooted and forced to navigate an unknown backdrop.
ONLINE EXHIBITION.
Almacén المخزن Armazém
‘akhi huna, Adrian Pepe, Ana Escobar Saavedra, Andrea Salerno, Cristina Serrano, Enrique Yidi, Sofia Basto Riousse
curated by Daniel H. Rey
April 24 – July 31, 2022
As a child in Paraguay, I grew up going to two almacenes for sweets. One was around the corner from home. The other one was three flights away. My first contact with the Arabic-speaking world was in the early 2000s in Levant, where I learned that sweets, no matter the ingredients or the distance, are still sweets. This formative period of two worlds connected by a child interacting with their sugar/azúcar/as-sukkar is what brings us here today.
Almacén المخزن Armazém is a multimedia research project storing and amplifying the archives and current explorations of artists, craft makers, chefs, musicians, and creatives at large who have ties to both Latin America* and the Arabic-speaking world. Playing on the Spanish word “almacén” and Portuguese “armazém” inherited from the Arabic “المخزنal-makhzen”, meaning “storage or warehouse”, this first volume focuses on micro and powerful interactions between the two regions by way of their peoples.
ONLINE EXHIBITION.
Dear Fractured Stones
Mojtaba Amini, Vooria Aria, Aidin Bagheri, Azin Haghighi, Tarlan Lotfizadeh, Mahmoud Maktabi, Shirin Mohammad, Nazanin Noroozi, Mitra Soltani
curated by Baharak Omidfard
November 22, 2021 – January 18, 2022
The exhibition Dear Fractured Stones, brings together a group of artworks exploring the nature of stone as material, as medium, and as metaphor. The exhibition will highlight the theme – (re)collect/(re)connect – one that demonstrates a variety of artistic strategies for repairing and re-establishing connections. Fractured stones can be understood as former parts of larger units whose connections are currently broken. A reparative attitude would thus allow these fragments to come together to form a unit, a whole.
Dear Fractured Stones, assembles nine artists from Iran and the Iranian diaspora. Although the presented works combine diverse art practices, they all share visual and content-related references to the themes of collection and archive. In this sense, fractured stones – whether depicted through installation, photography, as objects, or in painting – are transformed into condensed information carriers capable of absorbing and storing unknown narratives and, thus, of making such narratives visible. Behind each transformation lies an intention not only to not forget but also to actively remember. Such an approach shapes one’s self-image and worldview, and the selected works explore individual and collective memories, offering expanded insights into site-specific culture, history, politics, and mysticism, as well as into rituals connected with tomb culture and the occult.
What references to our present day and to our lived environment are contained within the idea (re)collect/(re)connect, and which strategies might serve as reparative in the context of an artwork? Formal and playful in syntax, Dear Fractured Stones, refers to the standard salutation of a letter and thus suggests a communicative exchange, one in which the fractured stone now has a chance to reply. _Baharak Omidfard
ONLINE EXHIBITION.
Garden of e-arthly Delights
Gulfgraphixx, Ahaad Alamoudi, Christopher Joshua Benton, Nadim Choufi, Fatemeh Kazemi / Maryam Faridani, Shamiran Istifan
curated by Ruba Al-Sweel
September 6 – November 15, 2021
Through video compilation, digital archival material, and moving images, Garden of e-arthly Delights forays into the dark forest of the web to look at what’s budding underneath the surface. From viral videos and memelords churning out digital arte povera to new forces that impact market dynamics and political trends, this fertile ground incubates and accelerates fringe movements and a new class of ideologues that together, test what we know.
Showcasing eight artists from, based in or around the GCC, whose works deal with memes as subject and medium, the exhibition explores wider expressions of gathering, ritual, and community to discover a new visual communicational landscape that maps out an alternative social terrain, varying definitions of being public and the terms of visibility and power.
ONLINE EXHIBITION.
Unconquered Spirits
Ulf Aminde, James Gregory Atkinson, Hanan Benammar, Mustafa Emin Büyükcoşkun, Cansu Çakar, Istihar Kalach, Rojda Tuğrul, Ülkü Süngün
curated by Didem Yazıcı
April 4 – June 15, 2021
What do forgotten or under-represented events say about historical writing and the politics of everyday life? If we trace them, where can the personal and collective memories, missing objects, or untold stories lead us today? In light of these questions, the works that comprise this exhibition irritates different forms of power structures such as institution, archive, discrimination, and state violence. Questioning the misuse of power dynamics and unsettling internalized racist structures, Unconquered Spirits brings together works by artists Ulf Aminde, James Gregory Atkinson, Hanan Benammar, Mustafa Emin Büyükcoşkun, Cansu Çakar, Istihar Kalach, Rojda Tuğrul, and Ülkü Süngün. At a time when social, political, and environmental injustices seem overpowering, we tend to lose hope: hope for more equality, justice, and fresh air to breathe. In Hope in the Dark, a book that traces a history of activism and social change over the past decades, writer Rebecca Solnit writes, “Resistance is first of all a matter of principle and a way to live, to make yourself one small republic of unconquered spirit.
Online CONVERSATION.
Istihar Kalach and Cansu Çakar in conversation with Didem Yazici
May 20, 2021
Ülkü Süngün and Mustafa Emin Büyükcoşkun in conversation with Didem Yazici and Ruba Al-Sweel
May 26, 2021
Ulf Aminde and Hanan Benammar in conversation with Didem Yazici
May 28, 2021
Subtle uneasiness, absurdity and humor; the paintings of Istihar Kalach and Cansu Çakar represent social-critique and dream-like lightness at the same time. Curator of our current exhibition Didem Yazıcı will be in conversation with the artists about their artistic methodologies and their works exhibited in the show.
The works by the artists Ülkü Süngün and Mustafa Emin Büyükcoşkun all take place in specific locations and histories and deal with underrepresented matters. Curator of the current exhibition Didem Yazıcı and arts writer and researcher Ruba Al-Sweel will be in conversation with the artists about their artistic methodologies and their works that are exhibited in the current exhibition Unconquered Spirits.
Each of the two works by Hanan Benammar and by Ulf Aminde has its own protest nature and distinctive language of storytelling based on personal experiences or witnesses. The curator of our current exhibition Didem Yazıcı will be in conversation with the artists about their artistic methodologies and their works exhibited in the show.
panel discussions.
On Ongoing
Azita Moradkhani and Farzaneh Hosseini in conversation with Christine Bruckbauer
Camila Salame and Christine Kettaneh in conversation with Amanda Abi Khalil
Benji Boyadgian, Elmira Abolhassani and Majd Alloush in conversation with Başak Şenova
Timo Nasseri and Navid Sajadi Azimi in conversation with Neil van der Linden
Wafa Hourani, Anahita Razmi and Jafra Abu Zoulouf in conversation with Nat Muller
February – March 2021
On Ongoing is a series of five online moderated panel discussions. Each brings artists together to talk about their connection to the core questions addressed in the online exhibitions. What connects the works in these exhibitions is an artistic practice that highlights tension. This practice interrogates and recasts everyday objects and events, drawing out their relationships to contemporary experience within a changing landscape of social and political events. While considering the historical context that has shaped the present, the chosen works also reflect on contemporaneity as a concept capturing the frictions of the present.
Online Exhibition.
Past Continuous
Elmira Abdolhassani, Majd Alloush, Parisa Aminolahi, Navid Azimi Sajadi, Nilbar Güreş, Wafa Hourani, Camila Salame
co-curated by Katharina Ehrl and Davood Madadpoor
October 7 – December 1, 2020
Past Continuous—Places of Identity and Dilemmas of the Present explores the relationship between memory, identity, and the dilemmas of contemporaneity. At the exhibition’s core lies the understanding that memory is integral to how we think about personal and cultural identity. Identity is not fixed or absolute—it is a fluid, continuous, and infinite process. Like the grammatical tense it refers to, Past Continuous implies actions or events that began in the past and persist into the present. The artworks on view are shaped by the past and inextricably tied to the present moment. The participating artists employ and deconstruct different aspects of memory and identity, as well as the histories embedded in them—ranging from “a nostalgic psychological return to the past” to “a self-identity and embodiment of cultural memory” (Hall, 1983, p.393).
Some of the works are playful or carry a mischievous tone, while others draw deeply from heritage and historical reflection to address the complexities of the present and the intricacies of identity. Yet all the works are connected by a strong sense of contemporaneity, challenging and blurring the boundaries between what was and is. The shared thread throughout all three chapters is a critical engagement with history, identity, and collective memory—woven from objects, documents, stories, and lived experiences. The works across the series mark tension and transformation by interrogating and recasting everyday materials and moments, exposing their links to current social and political realities. Beyond acknowledging the historical conditions that have shaped the present, Past Continuous reflects on contemporaneity as a space marked by friction, uncertainty, and constant redefinition.
Online Exhibition.
Present Continuous
Benji Boyadgian, Taha Heydari, Farzaneh Hosseini, Christine Kettaneh, Siavash Naghshbandi, Timo Nasseri, Anahita Razmi
co-curated by Katharina Ehrl and Davood Madadpoor
October 7 – December 1, 2020
Our history, identity, and collective memory are built upon a collection of objects, documents, stories, and experiences. What connects the works in these three exhibitions is the artistic practice that marks tension by interrogating and recasting everyday objects and events to draw out their relationships to contemporary experience in a landscape of successive social and political change. Apart from the imminent need to consider the historical context from which this current state of affairs has emerged, the chosen works reflect on contemporaneity as a concept that captures the frictions of the present.
Everyday life is a crust of earth over the tunnels and caves of the unconscious and against a skyline of uncertainty and illusion… while overhead stretch the Heavens of Permanence… Henri Lefebvre
Present Continuous emphasizes three aspects that interact with and—partly consciously, partly unconsciously—influence our lives with varying levels of intensity: everyday life, media, and transformation. Thinking about everyday life seems too banal, but contemporaneity, and hence our everyday life, is a mix of origin, transition, and an unknowable future. Media is a major element within society. Its development and social change are related since development has increased the complexity of societal actions and engagements. The exhibited artists work through all these impacts and changes, reflecting and taking up these events, which have become so ordinary for us that we almost classify them as commonplace. Present Continuous is an invitation to pay close attention to the artists’ tireless concern with topics that we know very little about and (mostly) do not actively participate in, which profoundly affect our lives.