About
We initiated Sumac Space as a platform to exhibit, to create a network, and facilitate dialogue among artists, curators, and researchers from West Asia and its diasporas. Also, we act as a bridge to Berlin: creating exchanges between the region, its diaspora, and Berlin-based practitioners and audiences. In 2026, as we enter a new phase, Sumac is shaping itself as a research platform centered on fictions & futures in contemporary art practices.
Through Dialogues and an annual Programme, we map how artistic practices operate and can act as forms of world-building and speculative forces—challenging established narratives, envisioning alternative worlds, and making different futures tangible. We think of futures fictioning as a method and a generative practice. One that is politically aware and imaginative.
Dialogues is publishing strand presenting essays, interviews, and experimental writing. It is a textual space where authors and artists come together to approach the art practices of region and its diasporas, which stress critical thinking in art and extend conversations across borders. It also helps to make visible insights and relationships that might still be unseen, and helps grow our Network organically.
In parallel, through Programme, we develop an annual open-call exhibition and event series co-curated with individual collaborators and research bodies. It rethinks the future by blurring the boundaries between time, memory, and imagination, making alternative worlds tangible.
Sumac took root during the pandemic. While the art world was rushing online, we chose to take a moment to listen. Through nearly forty conversations with artists and cultural practitioners, we understood common needs and exercised new ways of working together. This shaped our early work, in exhibition and text formats, in which contributors addressed questions of social constraints and power, memory and archive, displacement, and the materialities of everyday life. As the pandemic restrictions were lifted, Sumac embraced a nomadic model, collaborating with varied cultural spaces in Italy, Germany, and Austria to expand the network built around Sumac Space. Today, we carry this same spirit forward into our new focus on fictions & futures.
If you have a collaboration proposal or an idea for a contribution, we’d be happy to discuss it. Meanwhile, subscribe to our newsletter and be part of a connected network. [2026]
Sumac Space has the pleasure of collaborating with people whose spirit and insight we deeply respect and admire. Whether contributing as artists, curators, researchers, or authors, these individuals are essential to shaping our platform. We see this not just as a workspace, but as a slow, yet lasting, organically growing Network.
Team.
Davood Madadpoor was born and raised in Tehran, where he began his career as a co-researcher at the War Library. He pursued degrees in photography at the Iranian Photographers’ House and the Tehran University of Applied Sciences and Technology. Further studies in Florence led to a bachelor’s degree in visual arts and a master’s in curatorial studies from the Accademia di Belle Arti. His thesis focused on the relationship between art practices and the material reality of day-to-day life.
Until December 2022, he worked as a curatorial assistant at Villa Romana in Florence. In this capacity, he curated, assisted, and coordinated several projects, including Manifestiamo, The Tellers, The Broken Archive, Scuola Popolare I & II, and Seeds for Future Memories, among others. In October 2020, he co-founded Sumac Space, an ongoing project dedicated to contemporary art in West Asia. It addresses socio-political themes through exhibitions, dialogue, and collaboration that emphasize critical thinking in art practices.
In January 2023, he relocated to Berlin, where he continued his work aligned with Sumac Space. His research interrogates and recasts everyday events against the backdrop of a sociopolitical landscape in flux. As a curator, Davood explores this tension through narration and fiction that reconstruct the contemporary day-to-day as a mixture of origin, transition, and an unknowable future. (April 2025)
Pariya Ferdos[se] is a curator, researcher, writer, and architect who works between Tehran and Istanbul. She holds two bachelor’s degrees in computer science from the University of Tehran and architecture from Eastern Mediterranean University and Soore University. Additionally, she earned a diploma in Interior Architecture from the TAFE Institute in Australia. From 2018 to 2021, she was a co-researcher on the Human, All Too Human project at the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno (CAAM).
With a multidisciplinary academic foundation and a strong familiarity with mathematics, architecture, philosophy, history, and art, she brings an interdisciplinary approach to her research, curatorial practice, and spatial design. Between 2016 and 2023, Pariya served as an art director and co-founded three galleries in Tehran—Baharestan, Rischee 29, and Yafteh. She has curated and managed various projects, including Tehran Trilogy (2017–2018) and (Me)nace/mory (2022). Melancholia I (2023).
Her current areas of research include contemporary issues related to women, the translation of knowledge into tangible experiences, the incorporation of multisensory (synesthetic) elements into the perception of art, the use of language as a tool for thought and artistic expression, and the integration of time-consciousness into curatorial design. (April 2025)