About Us
Sumac Space began in 2020 as a platform to make exhibitions, build a network, and facilitate dialogues among artists, curators, and research bodies from and/or with a focus on West Asia and its diasporas.
During the pandemic, our early work was shaped in a series of online exhibitions, panel discussions, and publication. Contributors addressed questions of social constraints and power, memory and archive, possibilities and capacities of imagination, displacement, and the materialities of everyday life. As the pandemic restrictions were lifted, we were able to be mobile and collaborate with individuals and cultural spaces in different locations.
Sumac Space is developing as a research platform centred on fictions and futures in contemporary art practices. Through the publication in the Dialogues section and our curated Programmes, we map how artistic practices operate as forms of speculative forces to build and envision alternative worlds, challenge narratives, and make different futures tangible. We think of futures fictioning as a method and a generative practice, informed by political and critical inquiry.
Sumac Space takes form through two complementary strands.
DIALOGUES is our online publication for contextual and visual essays, interviews and conversations, and experimental writing. It is a textual space that brings critical perspectives into circulation and extends conversations across borders, making visible insights and connections that might otherwise be unseen.
PROGRAMMES continues these conversations into curatorial practice through open invitations, exhibitions, discursive labs, and events developed in collaboration with artists, curators, and researchers. Each one a way of sitting with the questions at the centre of our work here in Sumac Space.
Our work is sustained through project-based funding and in-kind contributions. Sumac Space is registered as a non-profit association (e.V.) in Berlin. If you have a collaboration proposal or an idea for a contribution to the Dialogues section, we’d be happy to discuss it.
Meanwhile, we invite you to subscribe to our newsletter and become part of this connected network. We use your email address only to send you occasional updates about our network, new publications, upcoming open calls, exhibitions, and events. You can unsubscribe at any time by using the link included in every email.
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, organically growing, lasting network.
Current team
Davood Madadpoor was born and raised in Tehran, where he began his career as a co-researcher in 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 in the context of artist residency.
Until December 2022, he worked as a curator and project coordinator 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, a space to navigate the art practices of West Asia and its diasporas via programmes and dialogues that emphasize critical thinking in art. In January 2023, he relocated to Berlin, where he continued his work as independent curator and researcher aligned with Sumac Space, exploring contemporary art via sci-fi and speculative imaginaries.
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.
Pegah Keshmirshekan is an artist and researcher based in Berlin, working across video, textile, painting and installation. Her practice explores displacement, diasporic memory, with a particular interest in how images and materials are understood across different social and cultural contexts, and how their meanings shift as they move between places. Her work has been shown at spaces such as SAVVY Contemporary, the Museum für Fotografie Berlin and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Alongside her artistic practice, she is interested in organizing cultural events and interdisciplinary programmes, with a particular interest in diasporic perspectives, intercultural exchange and the ways exhibitions can create space for unstable ideas of home, memory and cultural belonging.
Alongside her artistic practice, Pegah has several years of experience in cultural project coordination. At the Berlin University of the Arts, she co-developed and coordinated interdisciplinary programmes including IRAN 101 and FAVA Connection. Her organisational work has also included projects and programmes with Ballhaus Ost and Oyoun. Across these contexts, she has experience connecting artists, institutions and participants, coordinating collaborative processes and working with programmes shaped by migration, diaspora and intercultural exchange.