About
Sumac Space launched in October 2020 as a non-profit platform presenting contemporary art from the Middle East* through digital programs and critical writing. Devoted to the Middle East and its thriving contemporary art scenes, we work with artists and curators, who address contemporary urgencies in the context of the challenging socio-political circumstances of the region.
Alongside exploring our programs, such as online and in-situ Exhibitions, Sumac Space invites viewers to explore its digitally-accessible Artists’ Rooms and Dialogues, the core pillars that shape and define the entirety of Sumac Space.
Artists’ Rooms are digital architectures curated entirely by artists themselves that enable audiences to delve into each creative’s thinking process and research, beyond actual artworks. We believe that art practice is so much more than final works and therefore our aim is to disclose what is formative and proliferates artists’ practice on different levels. If Artists’ Rooms is primarily a space for viewing and contemplating relations between different artifacts and subjects, Dialogues is a place for being vocal. Here, authors and artists get together in conversations, interviews, essays and experimental forms of writing. We aim to create a space of exchange, where the published results are often the most visible manifestations of relations, friendships and collaborations built around Sumac Space.
We believe in the work of art in re-imagining and shaping our pasts, presents, and futures, asserting that they must have a public place for their research and diverse forms of expression. As we progressively build a community of artists, curators, researchers, and writers gravitating around the SWANA region, we welcome diverse voices to actively participate in forming Sumac Space. We propose collaboration and the fostering of a sense of shared and collective ownership, not as mere themes or theoretical concepts, but as unconditional ways of working.
contact@sumac.space
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* The geographical term Middle East is not neutral; rather, it is a Eurocentric word with colonial origins.
Sumac Space e.V., represented by the executive board:
Davood Madadpoor
Katharina Ehrl (until Nov. 2022)
District Court Freiburg im Breisgau, VR 703339
Tax number 0670/08333
Davood Madadpoor, b. 1981, Tehran Iran.
Davood was born and raised in Tehran, where he began his career at the War Library as co-researcher on methods of archiving. His interests in the arts led him to pursue degrees in photography at the Iranian Photographers’ House and the Tehran University of Applied Sciences and Technology.
He furthered his studies in Florence, where he obtained a bachelor’s degree in visual arts and a master’s degree in curatorial studies from the Accademia di Belle Arti. Here, he cultivated and explored his curatorial interests in the relationship between art practices and the material reality of day-to-day life, graduating with a thesis focused on local context as an impetus and inspiration for the art practices of artists-in-residence.
Until December 2022, he worked as a curatorial assistant at Villa Romana in Florence. In this capacity, he co-curated and assisted several projects, including Manifestiamo, The Tellers, The Broken Archive, Scuola Popolare I & II, Seeds for Future Memories, among others. He co-founded Sumac Space in October 2020, an ongoing project dedicated to art practices of the Middle East, addressing sociopolitical themes through exhibitions, dialogue, and collaboration that emphasizes critical thinking in creative practice.In January 2023, he relocated to Berlin where he continued his work, contributing to various projects including Echoes, au-delà, and Generative Encounters. The rest of his time is devoted to developing his research, aligned with Sumac Space, which revolves around interrogating and recasting everyday events against the contemporaneous backdrop of a sociopolitical landscape in flux. As a curator, Davood seeks to explore this tension in his projects through narration, storytelling, and fiction that reconstruct the contemporary day-to-day as a mixture of origin, transition, and an unknowable future.