Since the early 2020s, Hüseyin Aksoy has been developing a distinctive visual language in his Istanbul studio through painting, video, installation, collage, and works on paper. His practice is deeply rooted in the cultural identity of Mesopotamia, the region where he spent his childhood and youth. In his research-based and observational works, Aksoy is drawn to ancient settlements, cities, and ruins that have disappeared from modern maps. These sites serve as both the origin of his serial works and the foundation for the spiral-shaped images that appear in them. His affinity for civilizations lost to the course of history enables him to construct a reference system through which he poses questions about the present. Through this approach, he creates a hybrid visual narrative that highlights the cultural and political potential embedded in every trace and ruin, for those who choose to see.

In 2024, Aksoy launched Harmel as a long-term project. This video work also became the conceptual center of other evolving works, including paintings and installations that developed through interdisciplinary processes. The project follows the traces of Peganum Harmala, also known as Syrian Rue, a plant that grows spontaneously among ancient ruins and cemeteries. The idea of “bearing witness” forms two distinct connections in these works. The first, which can be described as documentary, involves Aksoy recording what he sees—whether with a camera, brush, or pen. The plant evokes death and disappearance, emerging in deserted mountain landscapes, yet Aksoy keeps its ominous presence visible. This leads him to a second, more imaginative layer, culminating in the series titled Mind Map.

Mind Map is an installation composed of found objects, drawings, three-dimensional forms, stones, and dried versions of Syrian Rue in various stages of growth. All have been carefully studied by the artist. The accompanying drawings were produced using organic walnut ink—a deliberate material choice. This also marked the beginning of another Scab series. Scab represents Aksoy’s effort to develop a new pictorial language. It focuses on architectural elements such as walls, towers, and ziggurats, forms one might encounter at ancient ruins. The brown stains of walnut ink shape images of past dwellings that recall the landscape of his youth. Yet these works are not tied to any single archaeological site. The textures of ancient cities, the silence of abandoned lands, and the feeling of vastness form the structural elements of the imagery.

Much like the abstraction in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities¹, Aksoy interprets these structures, walls, and stones as scabs—similar to the skin that forms over a wound. Scabs are a sign of healing and typically disappear once recovery begins. Treating ruins as scabs suggests a deeper interpretation: the places Aksoy draws upon function as zones of shared human memory. This idea extends beyond a humanist reading of the work.

From Aksoy’s perspective, the remnants of ancient civilizations are not passive fragments of the past. They appear as living terrains where imagined and mental landscapes emerge. This viewpoint references cycles of destruction and regeneration in Mesopotamian history, and touches on shifting political boundaries today. His work avoids linear perspective and spatial depth. Architectural forms—castles, churches, monumental gates, massive walls—appear suddenly and form the skeletal framework of a landscape. Amid brown-hued imagery, the artist introduces green plant motifs suggesting traces of life. These elements bridge the past and the present.

The Syrian Rue plant appears in its real size and form in Aksoy’s installations. In the Scab series, it takes on a metaphorical presence. Although these ruins and lost cities are devoid of human life, the plant becomes a signifier that bears witness to past events across time. Scholars have proposed various theories about the disappearance of ancient cities, including natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, and social upheavals like war and forced migration. The images in Scab confront viewers with the process of disappearance, giving the works a presence that defies loss. This carries a strong parallel to today’s political reality. Aksoy draws the individual bricks of his monumental walls with meticulous care, emphasizing their enduring testimony. He rescues them from anonymous silence and presents them as carriers of memory and history. By stripping away regional or cultural identifiers, the series extends beyond Mesopotamia and becomes relevant to cultures worldwide.

Following this focus on unrecorded histories, Aksoy began working on a new series titled Beyond the Sea. In this group of watercolors made with ultramarine blue pigment, he reinterprets fragments of mythological sculptures. These figures—such as Caryatids or Eros—evoke stories from the distant past. Aksoy builds on the visual strategies developed in Scab. Once again, he draws on past imagery to suggest messages for the future. The silence of ancient ruins merges with the patina covering statue fragments. This embeds a sense of historical aura deep within the works. But Aksoy does not stop with the atmosphere alone. He constructs images that can be understood through logic and association. He offers viewers visual cues for making sense of the strange, fractured world we live in today.

Dr. Necmi Sönmez studied art history in Mainz, Paris, Newcastle, and Frankfurt. He completed his doctorate at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University with a dissertation on the sculptor Wolfgang Laib. He continues to work as an independent curator and art historian in Düsseldorf.

¹ Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. Işıl Saatçioğlu, Yapı Kredi Publications, Istanbul, 2002

Hüseyin Aksoy, Saha Studio

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There has always been a peculiar absence in our family’s story, one I often questioned as a child. Why was my father’s birthday never celebrated? It wasn’t until adulthood that I understood why: no one knew the exact date. He was born in 1952 to a peasant family working the fields near Al-Zubair, a city in southern Iraq, but his birth was never officially registered. At first, I found that strange, even unsettling, until I came to realize how common it was in that specific time and place. In rural Iraq during the 1950s, when government offices were scarce, roads were unreliable, and literacy rates were low, many births went unrecorded. All that was passed down was a year and a place, remembered not through official documents but through spoken memory, fragile and perhaps reshaped over time.

According to our family’s oral history, our roots trace back to Al-ʿAmārah in southern Iraq, where our ancestors lived as part of the Marsh Arab community. In the vast wetlands between the Euphrates and Tigris, people built arched reed houses on small islands on water, navigated narrow waterways in canoes, and lived by fishing, herding water buffalo, and farming. My family remained there until the mid-20th century, when, like many others, my grandfather was forced to leave. His departure was part of a broader story: state neglect, class exclusion, and environmental degradation that made rural survival increasingly difficult.

My father’s childhood unfolded during the final years of Iraq’s feudal system, a landholding structure entrenched under the British-backed Hashemite monarchy. This system granted shaikhs (tribal landlords) control over vast agricultural estates. These landlords lived off the labor of peasants, who often retained only 15 to 25 percent of their harvest after paying rent and various fees.  It was a structure that kept rural families trapped in cycles of debt and dependency. Attempts at reform were largely superficial, intended to preserve elite power and foreign interests while deepening the struggles of those at the bottom. In places like Al-ʿAmārah, those who resisted were often expelled from their homes, sometimes with such brutality that it cost them their lives. Meanwhile, the region faced an environmental catastrophe. The 1940s brought waves of drought and flooding, broken irrigation canals, and the unpredictable behavior of the rivers. 

In 1958, Iraq’s Hashemite monarchy came to a sudden and violent end with a military coup. King Faisal II, only twenty-three, was executed at the al-Rihab Palace alongside members of the royal family. Yet it was Crown Prince ʻAbd al-Ilāh and Prime Minister Nuri al-Saʻid who suffered the most grotesque fates. The Crown Prince’s body was dragged through the streets, hung outside the Ministry of Defense, mutilated, burned, and eventually thrown into the Tigris. Nuri al-Saʻid, captured while fleeing in disguise, dressed as a woman, was shot on the spot. His body, buried hastily, was exhumed the next day and desecrated by an enraged mob. These were more than symbolic acts marking the fall of a regime. They seemed to channel something deeper and more primal: the fury of a long-oppressed, humiliated nation intent on erasing not only its rulers but any trace that the old order might return.

While crowds filled the streets in celebration, my grandfather, like many rural peasants who had suffered under the monarchy, welcomed the revolution with cautious hope. He likely understood the risks but still believed it might bring something better. However, instead of stability, it brought about another job loss and more uncertainty. So, he moved the family to Baghdad, joining thousands of others who were migrating in search of security amid the shifting political order.

As rural migrants arrived in Baghdad, families like ours were often labeled shurūg or shargawiyya—colloquial terms meaning “easterners.” These labels, used by established Baghdadis, marked newcomers from the south as outsiders and reinforced deep-rooted class and regional stigma. Yet many of these migrants were settled in the heart of Baghdad. My family, for example, made their home in the Sarifa slum of Shakiriya, an informal settlement that now stands where Al-Zawraa Park is located today.

Like thousands of others who arrived there with almost nothing, they initially built shelters from woven reed mats, materials brought from the south and traditionally used by the Marsh Arab communities. However, the colder, drier winters in central Iraq quickly showed that these homes were not suitable. Eventually, they turned to the clay-rich soil of Mesopotamia, which could be dried in the sun to form adobe bricks. These reed-and-mud structures became known as ṣarīfa huts, and by the late 1950s, Baghdad had approximately 44,000 of them, accounting for nearly 45 percent of the city’s dwellings. The neighborhoods where harsh conditions prevailed clustered around these huts. There was no running water or proper sanitation, and diseases like dysentery and tuberculosis were common. My father remembers the Shakiriya slums as places where crime and violence were part of daily life, with robberies, shootings, and assaults occurring regularly. Yet despite all this, many migrants still saw the city as a place of relative freedom, where at least they were no longer under the control of the shaikhs.

In 1963, another rupture reshaped the country. The Baʻath Party, backed by elements within the military and rumored foreign assistance, seized power. Soon afterward, officials forcibly relocated my family, along with thousands of others, to a newly planned suburb on the outskirts of Baghdad. Madinat al-Thawra, or “City of Revolution,” was built. Not only through the state initiative, but also through the labor of the rural, my teenage father, among others, prepared the foundations and laid bricks by hand to construct the family’s modest home. Although the neighborhood was promised as a place of improved living conditions, it still lacked access to basic services. But on top of that, it brought a new layer of hardship: physical distance from the city and a deepening sense of social segregation.

The following years were marked by deepening ideological rifts. By the late 1960s, the Baʻath Party had consolidated its power, and Arab nationalism had become the dominant force in public discourse. Dissent was increasingly silenced. It was in this climate that my father began to form his political identity. His daily routine as a student laid bare the country’s class divisions. Each morning, he walked for hours from the slums of Madinat al-Thawra to the Institute of Fine Arts in the city center. Many of his classmates arrived there by car, dressed in freshly ironed uniforms. The poor, unable to afford such clothes, often rejected them altogether, both out of necessity and as a form of protest. Yet inside the classrooms, these rigid divisions began to soften. Students from diverse backgrounds, including those from wealthy and low-income families, as well as Sunni and Shia, Christian, and Kurdish communities, formed friendships that challenged the hierarchies imposed outside the school walls.

The regime’s escalating violence against the Kurds deepened my father’s disillusionment with the Baʻath Party and led him closer to communism. This was not only a reaction to state repression but also rooted in a more extended history of dispossession in the south. Most residents of Madinat al-Thawra, including my family, had come from southern provinces where generations of neglect and exploitation turned communism into more than an ideology. It became a promise of justice, solidarity, and collective dignity.

By the mid-1960s, my father began contributing illustrations to Tariq ash-Shaab (“Path of the People”), the official newspaper of the Iraqi Communist Party, which continued to operate underground even after the Baʻath Party seized power. Despite increasing repression, he remained steadfast in his political convictions. Realizing he could no longer stay safely in Iraq, he fled the country. In 1968, he left for Yugoslavia.

As the Non-Aligned Movement gained momentum, Yugoslavia positioned itself between the Cold War blocs and fostered cultural and educational ties with post-colonial states, such as Iraq. Although Iraqi students were officially welcomed under South–South solidarity, the regime denied my father, who had no affiliation with it, any financial support. In Ljubljana, he learned Slovene, enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts, worked by day in various factories, and spent his nights at the print studio. Although he eventually gained professional recognition, he continued to face constant pressure. He was harassed by Baʻathist-affiliated students and monitored by UDBA, the Yugoslav State Security Service. At the 1983 Biennale of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana, one of his works was nearly censored after the Iraqi embassy intervened. Officials claimed that the print contained Arabic text offensive to the Iraqi state, taking advantage of the fact that few attendees could read the language. The work was temporarily withdrawn but later reinstated after a review found the accusation to be baseless.

By the 1980s, Iraq had descended into a climate of absolute fear. Political opponents were hunted, tortured, disappeared, and executed. While my father built a new life with my Slovenian mother, his residency status remained uncertain. Deportation loomed, and a return to Iraq could have meant imprisonment or worse. His brother, a member of the Communist Party, had already vanished without a trace. To this day, we still do not know what happened to him. Branded as a traitor, any contact with his relatives became too dangerous. To protect everyone, my father made the painful decision to sever ties with them entirely.

After decades of silence, I began asking questions about our Iraqi family, but my father had few answers. He had never written to them or spoken with them again. Eventually, I discovered a videotape sent by our Iraqi relatives after the fall of the regime. It was an invitation to reconnect, one that my father could not answer. Nearly two decades later, I did. That moment became the starting point for my project, The Last Sector.

I traveled to Baghdad for the first time in 2023. I discovered the material remains of the neighbourhood once known as the City of Revolution, later renamed Saddam City, and now referred to as Sadr City. The title of the project relates to a specific area within the subdivided area: the 38th sector, where my family resides. This was the outer edge of the district when my father emigrated. Although the city has since expanded, the name “The Last Sector” endures among its residents. The boundary has taken on a symbolic meaning, although its full significance remains unclear to me.

There, I met my Iraqi family for the first time. I explored the history and urban development of the area where they live and uncovered layers of family history I had never known. I documented what remained: homes made of brick and concrete, walls lined with fading photographs, and gold and green portraits of Imam Hussein that speak to their Shia tradition. I traveled south, canoed through the marshes, and observed the architecture of the arched reed houses that once defined our ancestral landscape.

These impressions formed the visual vocabulary of the project. I translated those references into compositions using screen printing, gold leaf, digital embroidery, and laser-cut wall reliefs. The visual language drew on a wide range of motifs: Fairuz, the iconic singer whose voice shaped my father’s childhood and marked his absence, and elements from our family’s carpet patterns, which I deconstructed and reassembled, layering them with the urban grid of what was once “City of revolution.” The compositions bridge personal and collective topographies.

What began as a search for closure evolved into an exploration of the unresolved space between my father’s estrangement and my own search for identity. It connects a home remembered in fragments with one never fully known. I return, speculatively, to the City of Revolution, a landscape shaped by dislocation, failed state planning, and the endurance of those pushed to the margins. I examine how political histories leave their mark on the built environment, and how those spaces, in turn, continue to shape the lives of those who inhabit them. Though the place now bears a different name, for me it became precisely what it once claimed to be: a site of revolution, of transformation, and a threshold where an old understanding collapsed and something new, uncertain, and unfinished began to take form.

References
Batatu, Hanna. The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq: A Study of Iraq’s Old Landed and Commercial Classes and of Its Communists, Baʻthists, and Free Officers. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978
Gupta, Huma. Migrant Sarifa Settlements and State-Building in Iraq. PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2020
Tahir, Hamid. Application for Yugoslav Citizenship and Permanent Residency
Translated documents, ca. 1980s. Unpublished family archive

The post From the Marshes to the City of Revolution: On Roots, Ruptured Histories, and Speculative Acts of Remembrance—Helena Tahir appeared first on Sumac Space.

ZînKolektif is an independent collective of women and queer artists united through photography. Functioning as a space of solidarity, the collective not only brings together individual photographic practices but also fosters shared ways of thinking, aesthetic approaches, and visual languages. Central to ZînKolektif’s ethos is a feminist perspective that profoundly shapes both the themes they engage with and their photographic methods. This approach resists dominant narratives and visual hierarchies by prioritizing collaborative processes, ethical representation, and contextual sensitivity. Their work often explores subjects such as memory, space, identity, and belonging through a lens that foregrounds lived experience, relationality, and resistance. Instead of objectifying their subjects, members of the collective frequently center voices that are historically marginalized, challenge masculine-coded visual aesthetics, and embrace experimental or process-based storytelling. In doing so, they not only increase the visibility of women and queer photographers but also reimagine photography as a critical tool for feminist inquiry and collective memory.

Each member of ZînKolektif comes from a distinct academic and professional background, contributing to the collective’s layered and pluralistic identity. Serra Akcan, trained in economics and professional photography, has produced long-term visual works on gender, identity, and migration. Aylin Kızıl, a pharmacist by education, focuses on urban transformation and displacement through photography and film. Fatma Çelik, a psychological counselor, explores memory, ecology, and gender through documentary photography and video. Serpil Polat, an educator from Dersim, documents social movements, environmental issues, and women’s rights. Gülşin Ketenci, with a background in mathematical engineering, centers her practice on feminist photographic methodology. Çiğdem Üçüncü, trained in the visual and performing arts in Germany, works on personal narratives of migration and ethnic identity. Their relationship with photography centers on an intuitive yet intellectually grounded process, shaped by lived experience and sustained political sensitivity. Each member constructs their own visual language, which gains new meaning within the collective. The richness of ZînKolektif’s work lies not in uniformity but in its intentional plurality—where diverse expressive forms coexist without aesthetic confusion, allowing solidarity and shared inquiry to emerge as guiding principles.

In Acts of Conflations, ZînKolektif takes individual stories as a starting point to discuss the broader issue of collective memory and representation. Rather than constructing a direct political narrative, they present narratives in which individual experiences are intertwined with aesthetics shaped by intellectual explorations. The works do not place the viewer in a fixed viewing position; they also invite them to question, engage with their memories, and think critically about the images. This exploration of memory and belonging inevitably raises questions about the tools and strategies of visual representation. These tools shape how such experiences can be shared and understood.

Navigating the Boundaries of Representation 
The collective members’ productions adopt an approach that questions the representational power of photography. This questioning is both an aesthetic choice and an ethical stance. Rather than documenting a particular social group, a geography, or an individual memory, most of the projects in the exhibition reflect on the visual strategies that make these representations possible. Issues such as the positioning of the subject, the angles from which the narrative is constructed, the direction of the gaze, and the way in which gaps are built form the basis of each work. In this context, the visual language does not employ photography as a mere documentary tool. On the contrary, it becomes a space for thinking, remembering, and questioning. The fictional approach seen in several works, including Displaced by Çiğdem Üçüncü, emphasizes that photography is not a device that reflects truth, but a medium that reconstructs, interprets, and transforms it. Therefore, the form of representation, its ethical framework, and the meanings it evokes come to the fore rather than the accuracy of the representation. These reflections on representation open into a more intimate terrain: the entanglement of body, space, and memory, where questions of visibility and presence become central.

Relationship between Body, Space, and Memory 
Each story in the exhibition traces the relationship between body and space. Artists such as Fatma Çelik and Serpil Polat explore how memory is embedded in space. They consider how the body integrates or conflicts with this spatial memory. In Fairy Escaped Water, Polat documents the ecological destruction and forced displacement caused by dam construction in Dersim, framing the landscape as both witness and archive. Similarly, Serra Akcan’s photographic work on urban space and daily life examines how women’s bodily presence interacts with transforming environments. In several works, the artists use their own bodies as narrative objects—insisting on visibility and challenging the limits of representation. The position of the body before the camera, the orientation of the frame, and its interaction with light and space all become conceptual anchors that interrogate what photography reveals and what it conceals.

Aylin Kızıl, who often works at the intersection of film and photography, brings bodily presence into relation with shifting urban and social landscapes. Her lens captures fragmented spatialities where physical absence evokes emotional density—suggesting that memory persists in and through disrupted spaces. Gülşin Ketenci, on the other hand, employs a self-reflexive feminist photographic methodology that places women’s labor and visibility at the core of spatial inquiry. Her work treats the female body not as an object to be seen but as a knowing, active presence that reclaims public and domestic spaces alike.

Along with the body, space is also key in ZînKolektif’s works. These spaces are not fixed or singular in meaning. In some projects, mountains, stones, water, or emptiness appear. They are not only geographical representations but also convey emotions, memories, or a sense of belonging. Here, space acts as an active narrative component, not just a backdrop. 

These visuals focus on images that work through direct association, such as childhood homes, abandoned spaces, lost objects, or water. These images carry personal experiences and are also part of collective memory. By situating the body within shifting spaces of memory, the works gesture toward photography itself as a process of thinking—an open-ended practice that operates beyond documentation.

Photography as a Form of Visual Thinking 
For the members of ZînKolektif, form is as important as content in their production processes. The methods used by each in their own practice range from analog printing to digital editing and from archival work to performative approaches. This diversity transforms the productions into a structure that enriches, nourishes, and fosters discussion among its members. Photography is used to establish a narrative, to interrupt, to create silences, and to leave gaps. These gaps turn into spaces where the viewer steps in and constructs meaning through their own experience. This approach demonstrates that they take a stance that invites the viewer to think together, rather than presenting them with a passive position. 

One key feature is the emphasis on group discussions throughout the production process. Each develops a narrative and shares ideas with others to broaden perspectives. The collective is not a temporary partnership. It fosters a lasting and sustainable practice of solidarity. This shared method of visual thinking reinforces the collective’s foundation in dialogue and solidarity, showing how memory and representation can be reshaped through collaboration.

ZînKolektif’s work shows that visual memory can be shaped collectively and individually. This memory encompasses recorded events, recalled details, forgotten memories, and reconstructed stories. Each visualizes a different layer of this memory. Their projects navigate the boundaries of representation, utilize emptiness, and evoke silence. They create alternative visual spaces for women and artists. ZînKolektif shares, shapes, discusses, and transforms this space together. This selection presented in the exhibition reflects ZînKolektif’s visual and intellectual partnership. It should be seen as a shared field of art, solidarity, learning, and shared production. Each frame carries a question, a trace, and a direction.

After receiving her BA in Sociology from the Faculty of Humanities at Anadolu University, Serenay Anık Gök earned her MA in Art and Design at Eskişehir Osmangazi University with a thesis titled The Relationship Between Photography and Memory: The Reproduction of Visual Representations. She is currently in the thesis stage of her degree in Proficiency in Art, focusing on female documentary photographers and the female gaze. Since 2020, she has worked as a research assistant. Her research interests include photography, visual sociology, memory, and cultural studies.

The post Collective Memory and Visual Representation: The Feminist Photography of ZînKolektif—Serenay Anık Gök appeared first on Sumac Space.

Karar verdik. Gölü bisikletle geçeceğiz.
Decision Made. We Are Crossing the Lake by Bicycle.¹

I don’t know how to swim, so water remains unfamiliar territory to me. I love the bicycle: casual, accessible, always ready to carry more than expected. My bike has a faulty gear, a loose chain, and a bent fender. It demands a gentle approach. It is better to travel at night. 

I learnt how to ride quite late. My engagement with art universities also came late, but quickly, as if trying to make up for all the years that had passed. Once I entered that world, I worked at institutions focused on diversity, inclusion, and social justice. These institutions often seemed to know their intended outcomes before their programs had even begun. Even though this signals a systemic absurdity we might all agree on, I found myself wondering: in my own work, how often did I already know the outcome from the start?

Crossing the lake by bicycle means doing something constantly—keeping the pedals turning (maintenance)—while also learning how to swim, in the water, and while cycling. There is so much life around us, and at some point, the sentences quietly shifted from “I” to “we.”

Here, “we” is sometimes just me and myself. Almost always, it is Ece Gökalp and me, co-founders of Orta Okul. Sometimes it is us and the marine species: shorter-term collaborators and participants. And sometimes, it is our wider habitat: a cloud of activists, feminists, dreamers, and weirdos who inspire us. 

Much of the institutional work on diversity and inclusion felt performative to us. The institutions themselves were so dominant that these policies seemed to serve their image more than the bodies and groups they were supposedly centered on. We were trying to learn art, make art, survive. We hold onto our passion while juggling within a system where institutions, not life, stand at the center. 

And then, we found each other. After countless conversations, often interrupted by excitement and urgency, Ece and I founded Orta Okul. 

Decision made. We are crossing the lake by bicycle.
Karar verdik. Gölü bisikletle geçeceğiz.

Orta Okul, meaning Middle School, was born from big dreams and strong intentions. Initially, we described it as an arts and crafts school that invites communities to be co-creators, particularly those excluded from art education due to barriers such as socioeconomic status, social class, or age. Over time, we began to shape its identity as multilingual and nomadic. 

Then, our areas of struggle became clearer: We focused on educational justice, anti-institutional art, participation, and reclaiming public space. With each new conversation and collaboration, Orta Okul gained more layers. Eventually, we began asking ourselves how we could remain engaged with so many issues while working with limited resources. 

This led us to rethink what the school could be. It became a mobile structure mounted on a bicycle trailer, carrying all its materials and traveling to (semi-)public spaces, associations, schools, shelters, and neighborhood houses. In each educational program, we began collaborating with local organizations, art spaces, and individuals to activate existing community resources. Beyond its physical form, this mobile and adaptable structure also started to reflect precarious stories, such as those of migration, displacement, and the lived experiences of marginalized communities.

Each educational program we organize is shaped by the needs, resources, and intentions of its participants. Every occasion borrows something from Orta Okul’s toolbox of struggles and tactics, and transforms it into something new. In this way, the school remains impossible to define fully. It moves across boundaries, embraces the flexibility of transition, and carries the responsibility of drawing new lines when necessary. This fluidity also pushes us away from fixed methodologies and pre-designed models. 

Since it is impossible to cover everything in one text, I will focus on a more modest aim. I want to explain, as clearly as possible, the three core principles that continue to guide our work.

Art with the community, not art for the community. Orta Okul is grounded in co-making. We support collaborative artistic practices that evolve through dialogue and shared experiences, rather than through the representation or reproduction of a community by an outside artist. For us, participation means more than just being present. It involves the redistribution of power. As Claire Bishop writes in Artificial Hells, quoting Guy Debord: “Participation rehumanizes a society rendered numb and fragmented by the repressive instrumentality of capitalist production.”² In this way, participation challenges traditional art models, which often focus on final products and are commodified, thereby removing them from their social context. 

An artwork does not become participatory just by including people. Many of the projects we designed with participation in mind ultimately became events where participants chose not to participate. In some cases, the work did not resonate and remained symbolic. 

Still, each of these attempts became an opportunity to learn. By reflecting on what did not work, we began to understand what could. For example, when the curriculum was intentionally left light, shifting from a set of instructions to a series of open-ended questions, it created space for people to engage. A curriculum that breathes invites co-ownership. Trust also grew when facilitators came from within the community and shared lived experiences with participants. This kind of resonance made engagement feel natural and immediate. 

One example was the Grupa Podrške (Support Group) seminar facilitated by Jelena Fužinato.³ It brought together women from BCMS (Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian) backgrounds who had given a pause to their art careers due to gendered reasons. Jelena herself was part of this community. Her presence built trust from the very beginning. Eventually, the group continued independently of Orta Okul and became a collective of its own. This was something we were oddly proud of stepping back.

Maintenance over development. This principle is inspired by Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Manifesto for Maintenance Art,⁴ where she contrasts the glorified idea of development with the often invisible labor of maintenance. She committed to valuing maintenance, what, as she put it, takes “all the fucking time.” 

In this spirit, Orta Okul prioritizes care, sustainability, and community engagement over the constant search for the new, the exciting, or the prestigious.

Maintenance demands long-term commitment. The difficulty lies in balancing energy, time, and funding. We keep returning to the same questions: What happens when the resources run out? Who continues the work— the initiators, the participants, or the institution? 

At Orta Okul, we respond by starting small. We design our seminars as short-term programs, four sessions, not just to introduce a topic but also to meet participants and see whether something deeper might develop. If the interest is there, we find ways to continue together. 

Last year, thanks to a rare and almost utopian opportunity, Ece and I co-created an educational program that lasted more than a year. We met the group every week and focused, on average, two days each week on this project. After nearly eleven months, one of the participants called it “our project”. This moment (which I did not witness and only know through Ece’s retelling) felt like a quiet arrival. Orta Okul had become what we had aimed for. As a group, we had begun with hesitation and disconnection. We established a shared space of trust as we invested time. And we stayed. 

Sometimes, things do not click. What is required of us is to stay and to keep showing up until we become familiar with it. This led to the final principle of Orta Okul.

Participants before curriculum. This principle draws inspiration from Black Mountain College, founded in 1933 in North Carolina, which nurtured community life rather than enforcing fixed curricula. The 1952 Prospectus declared that “the student, rather than the curriculum, is the proper center of the general education.”⁵ The school’s discomfort with the word “school” echoes Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society,⁶ which challenged the belief that education must take the form of formal instruction, certificates, and titles. 

At Orta Okul, we build our structure around social justice, participation, and safer space practices, while encouraging participants to shape the specifics of the curriculum with us. Facilitators are not selected for their titles, but for their flexibility and ability to connect with the group. The pace of a seminar, the materials it uses, and even the space where it unfolds are all shaped through collective dialogue between the Orta Okul team, participants, facilitators, and sometimes caregivers.

By now, I am no longer sure how much of what I have written reflects what truly happened, and how much belongs to what we hoped would happen. That uncertainty may be a natural part of the process. One way to keep this school alive is to value small, everyday victories. 

What we try to center –in contrast to the systems we observe, read about, or resist– is something nomadic rather than fixed, fluid rather than standardized, alive rather than institutional. And more often than not, it includes a deep appreciation for lightness and the small-scale.

In the end, crossing the lake by bicycle becomes easier when we stop trying to turn it into a ship. Instead of growing into an institution, Orta Okul might discover new paths by staying small, holding onto its simplicity, and showing up, week after week.

1.  Bener, V. O. (n.d.). Yorumsuz. In Kapan (pp. 41–42). ︎
2.  Bishop, C. (2023). Artificial hells: Participatory art and the politics of spectatorship. Verso books. ︎
3.  See: https://www.ortaokul.info/2024/grupapodrske ︎
4.  Ukeles, M. L. (2018). Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! Proposal for an exhibition Care. Journal of Contemporary Painting, 4(2), 233-238. ︎
5.  Black Mountain College. (1952). Black Mountain College Prospectus for Spring Semester, February 11–June 7, 1952. Reprinted in V. Katz (Ed.), Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art (p. 202). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ︎
6.  Illich, I. (1971). Deschooling Society; Ivan D. Illich. Calder and Boyars. ︎

Ipek Çınar is an artist and researcher working predominantly with participatory and socially engaged art practices. She uses play, joy, and unexpected encounters as means of expression. She studied Political Science at METU Ankara and Art in Context at UdK Berlin, and is currently a PhD candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Alongside her artistic production, she also works in the field of anti-discrimination and social justice. İpek Çınar loves the word “Orta” (Middle): She is co-editor of Orta Format and is a co-founder of Orta Okul.

The post Decision Made. We Are Crossing the Lake by Bicycle—Ipek Çınar appeared first on Sumac Space.

Yaqeen Yamani’s work Checking In—a collection of eighteen text messages sent to Palestinians amid an unfolding genocide—transcends sociological critique, evolving into a meditation on language as both witness and accomplice to erasure. These messages, phrased in the rhetoric of care yet hollow in their affect, invite viewers to navigate the architecture of the Symbolic Order: a structure that polices truth, conceals complicity, and transforms human suffering into ritualized performance.

Through the lens of French feminist thought, this essay explores how Yamani’s work illuminates the quiet complicities embedded in language. It reveals the mechanisms by which Western discourse enacts Abjection—the casting out—of the Palestinian subject. The critiques that Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Hélène Cixous directed at Phallogocentrism—that paternal, logic-bound tongue—resonate with the colonial narratives that continually attempt to erase Palestinian identity and pain. In this light, Checking In is not merely an artwork but an intervention—a confrontation with the ways language itself can be weaponized, sanitized, or rendered inert.

Julia Kristeva: The Rhetoric of Performance and Political Abjection
In Kristeva’s theory, Abjection names the primal force that assaults the boundaries of the self, demanding expulsion to preserve the illusion of psychic coherence. It is not a matter of filth alone, but an existential rupture—an unthinkable presence that threatens the fragile separation of “I” and “Other.”

On a geopolitical scale, the explicit acknowledgment of genocide, the affirmation of Palestinian subjectivity, and the confrontation with systemic complicity destabilize the Western Symbolic Order itself. These truths are the political abjects of our time. The brief “checking in” message operates as a defensive mechanism—a linguistic anesthetic—that allows the complicit subject to maintain distance from this disturbance. The query “How are you?”, uttered amid catastrophic erasure, functions as a shield against unbearable reality. By omitting “Palestinian” and refusing to name the violence precisely, these messages exile both subject and suffering to the margins, absolving the sender of responsibility while preserving the illusion of ethical concern.

Kristeva defines the Symbolic Order as the domain of law, custom, and language that regulates the untamed forces of the Semiotic—rhythm, emotion, instinct. Within Checking In, the language of care emerges as a symptom of this order’s collapse. Grammar and syntax remain intact, yet affective depth has been drained. The Semiotic pulse that animates authentic empathy is absent. What remains is a hollowed-out ritual: the performance of empathy without its substance, a gesture designed to maintain social composure and avert acknowledgment of moral collapse.

By collecting and exhibiting these eighteen messages—and framing them explicitly as a critique of complicity in genocide—Yamani reinjects the abjected real into the public sphere of art. The work fractures the veneer of serenity maintained by the Symbolic, forcing the viewer and the complicit subject alike to confront what had been expelled: real suffering, lived experience, and ethical accountability. This is a Semiotic rebellion, a return of the repressed, revealing the quiet power structures embedded within language.

Luce Irigaray: The Politics of Denied Difference and Critical Mimicry
Irigaray’s critique of Phallogocentrism—the patriarchal logic that recognizes only one subject, the masculine One—extends to political discourse as an indictment of the denial of difference. In Checking In, this critique is rendered vividly: the refusal to name “Palestinian” is not incidental, but central to the work’s examination of systemic erasure.

As patriarchy permits only a single gendered subject, global discourse often permits only a single narrative of power. By failing to name “Palestinian,” the messages participate in this denial, reducing a particularized struggle into abstraction. The Palestinian, as a subject defined by historical specificity and political identity, is denied recognition. This linguistic flattening transforms a complex colonial reality into a neutralized humanitarian story, where suffering is generalized and history obscured.

Irigaray theorized mimicry as an insurgent strategy: the deliberate over-performance of the role assigned by the dominant order to expose its hollowness. Yamani enacts this principle through the exhibition itself. By re-presenting these phrases of hollow empathy, the artist mirrors the language of power to reveal its emptiness. In Acts of Conflations, mimicry becomes an act of resistance: the repetition exposes the mechanisms of erasure embedded in everyday communication, transforming passive compliance into a critical intervention.

Irigaray’s emphasis on the materiality of the body resonates in Yamani’s choice of medium: text on glossy paper. This materialization transforms abstract messages into objects of presence. The gloss, the weight, and the tactile quality of the paper restore the Palestinian subject where language had imposed absence. Within the exhibition space, the texts assert themselves as objects demanding recognition, reminding viewers that language, when materialized, carries accountability.

Hélène Cixous: Reclaiming the Body’s Voice and Narrative Sovereignty
Cixous’s notion of Écriture Féminine—writing from the body, from instinct, from breath—sought to dismantle the sterile grammar of the paternal tongue. In Checking In, this principle manifests as the reclamation of the Palestinian voice, reviving a silenced narrative.

The “checking in” dispatches are echoes of a disembodied tongue, stripped of emotion and instinct. They sever the link between word and lived suffering. The sender, unwilling to inhabit another’s pain, shelters in a rhetoric of composed detachment. This mirrors the paternal tongue Cixous critiques: rational, coherent, but emptied of human resonance.

Cixous emphasizes the power of silence, the force of the unsaid. In Yamani’s work, the truth resides in what is omitted: the erased words—“Palestinian,” “genocide,” “occupation”—carry more weight than the phrases that remain. These silences are not passive voids but instruments of suppression, sustaining systemic erasure. Yamani turns these absences inside out, transforming silence into presence, and demanding that viewers acknowledge what language refuses to name.

Emerging from dialogues with Palestinians in the United States, Checking In is inherently communal. It assembles dispersed experiences into a chorus of voices, transforming individual narratives into a shared language of resistance. Through these eighteen fragments, the Palestinian lived experience becomes palpable, political, and plural—insisting upon recognition, refusing isolation, and asserting sovereignty over its own narrative.

Across the work, the interplay of silence and speech, absence and presence, reveals the ethical stakes embedded in language. By foregrounding the empty gestures of empathy, Yamani’s artwork calls attention to the ways linguistic structures maintain complicity. It demonstrates that language is never neutral: it shapes, erases, and validates, and it is within this field that resistance must operate. Checking In compels viewers to confront not only what is said, but how it is said, and what remains unspoken.

The juxtaposition of minimal material—text on paper—with maximal ethical and affective force allows the installation to operate on multiple registers simultaneously: aesthetic, linguistic, and political. The exhibition space becomes a site where the unseen machinery of erasure is revealed, where the abjected subject returns, and where the viewer is implicated in the act of witnessing.

Where Words Return: Echoes of Presence
With the simplest of tools—text and paper—Yaqeen Yamani excavates the structures of linguistic violence that silently sustain erasure. Through the lens of feminist psychoanalysis, Checking In reveals how the dominant language—the Phallogocentric Symbolic Order—erases the Palestinian subject even while claiming to convey care.

Yet the work does more than reveal: it restores. By making visible the mechanisms of complicity, Yamani brings presence, materiality, and voice back into the space where absence once prevailed. Through mimicry, through silence, and through the return of the abjected real, Checking In transforms the gallery into a space of ethical and critical engagement. Here, language itself becomes a site of reclamation, a vessel for witnessing and bearing responsibility.

The Palestinian subject, once removed and silenced, reemerges—not as abstraction, but as a living, speaking presence. In this careful return, each word, each absent word, each deliberate silence resonates. The exhibition Acts of Conflations is no longer merely a site of display; it becomes a crucible where language, presence, and witness converge. Through this act, Yamani restores not only what was lost to erasure but also the possibility of recognition, justice, and the enduring affirmation of identity.

Safoora Seyedi is a writer and researcher exploring art, literature, and memory through a feminist lens. She holds an M.A. in International and World History from Columbia University, with a thesis titled “Narrative as a Historical Document.” Seyedi contributes essays and art reviews to various journals and engages in collaborative reading projects, examining how stories and images shape collective memory.

The post The Word Dismantled to Compose a Single Silence—Safoora Seyedi appeared first on Sumac Space.

The text will be published in Italian in the upcoming issue of Arabpop—Contemporary Arab Arts and Literature magazine.

Wafa Hourani’s work does not just imagine futures: it builds them, piece by piece, often in miniature. Born in 1979 in Hebron, Palestine, Hourani grew up as one of 21 siblings in a refugee household shaped by displacement and history. His art crosses boundaries—sculpture, photography, poetry, painting, film, and sound—but at its core is the act of building worlds: not imagined escapes, but worlds rooted in present conflict, shaped by both personal loss and shared memory. He works at the edges of perception: between physics and poetry, memory and myth, war and imagination. Based in Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank, his work holds the contradictions of life under occupation without reducing them to slogans.

Hourani believes fiction can tell the truth in ways reality cannot. In his work, different pieces come together to create scenes that are both real and unreal. A flower might become a fighter jet. A gun might contain an impressionist landscape. The medium matters less than the method: rearranging what already exists to show what else could. His approach is deeply tied to science; not in terms of data, but in the urge to understand how things relate. Quantum physics, superposition, and systems theory all influence his visual logic. He draws from math as easily as from myth. 

Wafa Hourani builds futures that are political, personal, and unfinished—not to offer answers, but to make space for new ones. He does not make art to explain Palestine to the world. He makes art that asks the world to look at how it describes itself. His art does not close stories; it opens them. Through layers and contradictions, he creates new ways of feeling: a world that has not arrived yet.

Cinema Dunia once was a vibrant cultural space in Ramallah, hosting events from screening Cecil B. DeMille’s Samson and Delilah to jazz concerts and bodybuilding competitions. It was a central gathering place that attracted audiences not only from Ramallah itself but also from nearby Al-Bireh, Jerusalem, and surrounding villages. This rich mix of cultural programming made Dunia a unique place of collective experience. However, its life was disrupted during the First Intifada in 1987, when Palestinian chose to close down cinemas as a strategic decision to prioritise resistance over entertainment. The building was eventually demolished, its land first converted into a parking lot and now replaced by a commercial tower housing international fast-food chains, marking a stark shift from a communal cultural space to a site of global consumerism.¹

Wafa Hourani’s artwork, a meticulously crafted model of Cinema Dunia, is far more than a miniature replica of a demolished building. Inside the model, he places Mirror Garden, an imaginative public plaza where viewers confront their reflection; mirrors here function politically (the Mirror Party) as a way to make social accountability visible and to prod internal critique and resistance to external occupation. Cinema Dunia is a dense, layered object that functions as a site of political critique, a vessel for collective memory, and a trigger for the imagination. He also reads Dunia’s closure as an internally driven rupture in Palestinian cinematic life. He stages this loss in the model through an 11-minute looped montage of Palestinian fiction fragments, which gestures toward the archive’s unrealised potential. Still, in The Historical Timeline of Qalandia 1948-2087, he refuses total erasure: Cinema Dunia endures in his future narrative, folded into the Mirror Party timeline where walls become mirror-surfaces and the site is repurposed as a space for reflection and political imagination.²

Hourani’s Cinema Dunia operates at the intersection of two poles, simultaneously critiquing the world’s desire to contain and beautify the Palestinian narrative and extending a profound invitation to reconstruct what has been violently erased poetically.

Susan Stewart, in her work On Longing, argues that the miniature appeals to us because it offers a world over which we can exert total control. It creates a relationship of power where the viewer becomes a giant, a god-like figure gazing down upon a self-contained, manageable universe. From this perspective, Hourani’s Cinema Dunia is a profoundly political and critical object. It takes the painful history of a public place—a history of cultural flourishing, political resistance, closure, and eventual submission to global capitalism—and transforms it into an artefact. The complex reality of cinema is miniaturised into an object that can be displayed in a pristine gallery, observed from a safe distance, and even possessed by a collector. The body of the viewer is necessarily excluded: one cannot enter this cinema, but from a controlled distance one can hear its films. This act of creation is a sharp, implicit critique. Hourani presents the world with what it seems to want: a Palestinian story that is contained, beautiful, and possessible. He grants viewers a sense of mastery over a history they might not truly comprehend, but which enables them to become a tourist of trauma, able to appreciate the form without feeling the full weight of its content.³

However, the work goes beyond Stewart’s lens of control. We should not miss its poetic power, knowing that Wafa´s book of poems might be published soon. At this point one should move to Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. For Bachelard, the miniature is not an object of control but a catalyst for reverie. It does not shrink the world; it expands the imagination. He posits that a small object, when contemplated, can unlock a universe of intimate immensity. From this vantage point, Hourani’s Cinema Dunia is not a contained object, but an explosive one. It is a machine for generating daydreams.⁴

Looking at the model in 1 x 2 x 1.7m scale, the viewer’s imagination is not subdued but ignited. It invites us to join the vivid life of cinema and its surroundings. We are prompted to inhabit the space mentally, to reconstruct the scenes that the historical fragments describe. The architectural details—the privileged penwar⁵ seats, the mezzanine, the narrow stage—cease to be mere formal elements and become stages for forgotten human dramas. Hourani populates these stages with figures and Houses: anonymous whites that stand as the audience, coloured characters that mark the people of Ramallah, and houses with varied antennae that double as a critique of mass media and propaganda.

Bachelard’s idea speaks to the power of the human mind, particularly through imagination, to grasp and interact with the world profoundly, going beyond mere perception or scientific understanding: it is not an act of political domination, but one of intimate, tender care. We do not possess the story; we are entrusted with it. The model becomes a sacred space where the ghosts of a community’s past are invited to gather in a future. At the same time it allows for a poetic journey, a way of feeling the immensity of the loss precisely because of the smallness of the object that represents it.

Wafa Hourani’s Cinema Dunia flickers between two states: an object of critique and a receptacle of imagination. It confronts us with our gaze, forcing us to ask whether we are consuming a tragedy or participating in an act of remembrance. It is a statement about how memory is packaged for an external audience, and simultaneously a deeply personal invitation to rebuild a lost world within the vast theatre of the mind. Hourani does not simply mourn a demolished building: for him, Cinema Dunia is still there. He claims that while a physical space can be erased and paved over, the world it once contained—its dreams, its fears, its culture, its life—can be resurrected, immense and powerful, within the quiet confines of a box.

¹ Yassin, Inas. 2010. Projection: Three Cinemas in Ramallah & Al-Bireh. Institute for Palestine Studies. https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/78362
² Hourani, Wafa. The Historical Timeline of Qalandia 1948-2087. The Broken Archive. https://www.brokenarchive.org/artist/wafa-hourani
³ Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984
⁴ Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Translated into Farsi by Maryam Kamali & Mohammad Shirbacheh. Tehran: Roshangaran, 2013
⁵ The penwar seats, regarded as the most exclusive, were situated in the front balcony. They were reputed to be more comfortable and were enclosed by a modest barrier, resembling private boxes

Born and raised in Tehran, Davood Madadpoor is a Berlin-based curator and photographer. With a background in visual arts and curatorial studies from Florence, his practice explores speculative artistic strategies—particularly fictioning—as ways of reimagining contemporary realities shaped by transition, constraint, and shifting socio-political landscapes. He co-founded Sumac Space, an ongoing project dedicated to contemporary art in West Asia. It develops exhibitions and dialogues that emphasize critical thinking in art practices.

The post The Return of Wafa Hourani’s Cinema Dunia—Davood Madadpoor appeared first on Sumac Space.

The adaptation of science fiction codes by certain artists from the Arab geocultural space has enabled them to present innovative and imaginative visions of the future within an original representational regime in contemporary art. Whether through fantastic archaeology coupled with military SF in In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain (2015) by Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind, or through biotechnological anticipation bordering on absurd dystopia in Party on the CAPS (2018) by Meriem Bennani, certain works offer a rich and diverse perspective on the possible transformations of contemporary societies. The multiplication of artworks by Arab artists exploring the question of the future has been accompanied by a multitude of events in the form of writings, exhibitions, and cultural programs highlighting the phenomenon of “Arab futurisms,” a label with unstable contours, difficult to define, more or less autonomous, and oscillating between dreamed unity and forced grouping.

Taking as a starting point the exhibition ARABOFUTURS, this essay aims to retrace the presence of certain events that brought together varied bodies of work and discourse, all driven by a shared interest in contemporary Arab art and reflection on the future. We will here attempt to explore the genesis of these artistic events, to return to the key moments that catalyzed the emergence of these clusters of works, as well as the discourses that accompanied them. By tracing the thread of time backward, we will be better able to understand how these dynamics were born, how they evolved, and how they nourished the phenomenon of “Arab futurisms.” So, fasten your seatbelt and prepare for a journey through a four-dimensional art history!

HOW TO “EXPRESS…
ARAB FUTURISMS”

Our first journey takes us to Brussels four years ago, specifically between December 2020 and June 2021. It was at Bozar, the Centre for Fine Arts in the Belgian capital, that Arabfuturism was presented in collaboration with the Mahmoud Darwish Chair: a videographic polyptych accompanied by a session showcasing the performance. Owing to the Covid-19 pandemic, the festival was entirely reimagined in a hybrid format, attracting a worldwide audience. It spanned five dates and featured videos by Larissa Sansour and Monira Al Qadiri, and by Mariam Mekiwi and Bassem Yousri. There were also performances by Monira Al Qadiri and Malika Djardi. The link between this selection of works was justified by the fact that they explored “future beyond Arab uprisings and their de/illusions, beyond militarized territories and borders, beyond recent geopolitical narratives within on going civil protests,” but also because they “aim[ed] opening other narratives and critical thoughts on contemporary Middle east and beyond.” Focusing on the theme of “Arab futurisms,” this broad selection revolved around a reflection on science fiction resources to reimagine a notion of Arabness adaptable to the contexts of artistic creation in the early 21^st century. Thus it is to be understood as an artistic constellation advocating emancipation from various contemporary forms of violence and oppression through the use of science fiction.

This curatorial approach of bringing together different artists around a theme was not limited to the context of exhibitions and screenings. It is also observable in the press. Nevertheless, while the articles do not provide detailed analyses of the works or the notions invoked, they inscribe this phenomenon within the framework of an artistic movement. Such is the case of “Arabfuturism: How Arab artists are building the world of tomorrow” (2023), published by Farida Ali for Middle East Eye. The author does not hesitate to speak of a “cultural movement” aimed at “reimag[ining] the world of tomorrow,” mixing contemporary artworks, cinematic and literary works, and supporting her argument with historical facts. This article can be read as a mirror to the text “Afrofuturism and Arabfuturism: Reflections of a Present-day Diasporic Reader” (2016) by journalist Lama Suleiman for the Israeli magazine Tohu. There, Suleiman articulated Arabfuturism as a new form of Afrofuturism, one proposed by Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones as a genre of Afro-diasporic cultural production and a framework for analysis and critique in various fields of Black technocultural studies. Also citing artworks and videos, such as those by Sophia Al-Maria and Larissa Sansour, Suleiman questioned the potential relevance of the concept to elaborate discourse on the cultural production of Arab diasporas, particularly Palestinian ones, with regard to the prospect of a future. Between these two articles, which crystallized the notion of Arabfuturism, Perwana Nazif published in the British magazine The Quietus the article “Arabfuturism: Science-Fiction & Alternate Realities in the Arab World” (2018), in which she stated that “Arabfuturism is a new and necessary artistic movement for countering the xenophobia and racism of Europe and America.”

Beyond the fact that she positions Arab futurisms within an artistic movement—as Farida Ali had done—Perwana Nazif also inserts them into a form of expression specific to the Arab diaspora—as Lama Suleiman had supposed—while adapting it to the various forms of racism present in the West. This article differs from the previous two in that the journalist met with Larissa Sansour and Sulaïman Majali to gather their views on the concept. Larissa Sansour clearly expressed her refusal to define, or even be associated with, the notion. As for Sulaïman Majali, who wrote Towards a Possible Manifesto, proposing Arabfuturism/s (Conversation A) (2015), he does not contest it, but emphasizes the importance of the impossibility of precisely defining Arab futurisms, asserting that this is precisely where its relevance lies: “Because defining is conquering and this is a way of pushing against that. Creating ambiguous versions of oneself. Right now, that’s the most subversive political act we can do.” I contributed to this discussion by adding that “the future of Arabfuturism therefore depends on this subversion,” words that concluded Arabfuturism(S) – Un Phénomène Passé À La Loupe, in ONORIENT (2019). Along similar lines, a review of Bozar’s programming published in La Boussole de la Gorgone (2021) remarked that “labeling has always been a colonial and conquering activity par excellence”, which may explain why “the instigators themselves blur the tracks.” Beyond this dialogical space established through these various writings, it is undeniable that the event organized by Bozar adopted a title that carried within it the weight of these exchanges and reflections. Yet it skillfully avoided the trap of categorization by refraining from offering a rigid definition, instead encouraging the invited artists and the public to forge their own conceptions.

THE STAKES OF “GULF FUTURISM”
BETWEEN APPRECIATION AND ASSIMILATION

Let us now move to Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, where numerous parallel initiatives have fostered forms of futurisms. If only a few are to be named, we could cite the biennial and international symposium “Tasmeem” in Doha in March 2022, themed “Radical Futures;” in January 2021, the launch of the Emirati Futurism Award by the Dubai Culture and Arts Authority and the Dubai Future Foundation; the appointment of artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan as artistic director of the Museum of the Future in Dubai in 2020, as well as the collective exhibition Speculative Landscapes (2019), bringing together Emirati artists Areej Kaoud, Ayman Zedani, Jumairy, and Raja’a Khalid at New York University Abu Dhabi’s gallery (NYUAD), to represent imagined territories.

Though very different from one another, highlighting different actors and overseen by distinct institutions, these initiatives are, overall, the result of the reception of Gulf Futurism. In the Gulf context, the term “futurism” has been used by artists to define a concept related to the region’s modernist ideology and its consequences in the contemporary period, as well as within the context of its artistic globalization. Gulf Futurism as an aesthetic was officially introduced in an interview published in the British magazine Dazed & Confused in November 2012, in which Sophia Al-Maria and Fatima Al Qadiri were interviewed. This interview was accompanied by a series of images—presented in ARABOFUTURS—featuring the two artists in futuristic stagings. In another jointly written text in the same magazine in 2012, they explained that Gulf Futurism documents the Gulf’s futuristic ideology. The latter is characterized by a phenomenon of rapid growth where substantial revenues, mostly from hydrocarbon reserves, are directed toward ambitious urban projects, forward-looking technological advancements, and consumer goods. This sudden change was fully experienced by the two artists as children and teenagers in the 1980s and 1990s, in Doha for one and Kuwait City for the other. Their approach, and more specifically that of Sophia Al-Maria, was therefore to reassess, from 2008 to 2016, certain hegemonic narratives of modernity and the effects of retro culture by engaging in extended interactions in the Gulf on specific subjects through a variety of media (music, writing, video, and contemporary art), deliberately blurring the lines between reality and imagination, tangible science and science fiction, the realization of a utopia and a plunge into dystopia. It is precisely this intermediary position—what Sophia Al-Maria calls the “threshold”—that gives the notion its power, even its critical potential, aesthetically, politically and socially.

SCIENCE FICTION AS A LABORATORY FOR ARTISTIC AND CURATORIAL EXPERIMENTATION

Let us move to Beirut in 2015. In that year, British curator Rachel Dedman brought together the works of Jananne al-Ani, Ali Cherri, Fayçal Baghriche, Ala Ebtekar, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Assad Jradi, Mehreen Murtaza, and Larissa Sansour for an exhibition exploring the theme of space and SF. Entitled Space Between Our Fingers, the event was spread across five venues in Beirut (The Hangar UMAM, the Arab Image Foundation, Mansion, and the libraries of Ashkal Alwan and Dawawine), thus forming a kind of urban “constellation” situated in a zone of research and documentation where productions of Arab SF—in literature, cinema, and visual arts—were brought together for deep reflection.

In this exhibition, outer space appeared as a formidable tool for developing alternative pathways, not only to terrestrial spatial controversies but also for rethinking new historiographical strategies. In this vein, she sought to continue the reflection by inviting American-Lebanese screenwriter and director Darine Hotait, filmmaker and founder of the Lebanese comic collective Samandal Fadi Baqi (also known as The Fdz), and journalist Yazan al-Saadi to Ashkal Alwan in May 2015 to discuss the perspective of possibility that Arab science fiction might underpin. The discussion attempted to examine questions related to SF’s critical potential, its experimentation with the Arabic language, and the power of the genre’s marginal status in a regional context. Among the topics raised were various platforms and events, such as the Islam and Science Fiction blog (active between 2005 and 2022) by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad in the United States of America, and the Sindbad Sci-Fi platform (active between 2013 and 2018) run by Yasmin Khan in the United Kingdom.

When Khan founded it, her goal was to materialize her desire to research and disseminate this theme to a broad British public, contributing to establishing cultural and artistic links on a European scale. Its activities took shape through a variety of panels held at several festivals to promote the study of SF produced in North Africa and West and South Asia while also focusing on real technological developments in society. This British platform was a key player in the rediscovery of Arab SF, its attempts at definition, and its associated discourses. It was during one of these panels in 2014 that Larissa Sansour presented the early stages of In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain as a premiere. In 2017, Yasmin Khan notably oversaw a section devoted to Arab SF as part of the exhibition Into the Unknown: A Journey Through Science Fiction, first presented at the Barbican in London before touring two other European cultural institutions (2017–2019).

The participants of the roundtable coordinated by Dedman unanimously expressed the need for such a platform in an Arab country, emphasizing interdisciplinarity so that no medium would be favored over another. This did not happen. In continuity with these two events and the reflections addressed, Dedman organized a second exhibition linked to SF and North Africa and West Asia entitled Halcyon, which took place in August 2016 as part of the Transart Triennale in Berlin. The aim of this event was to bring together a group of artists, writers, and filmmakers (Mirna Bamieh, Tom Bogaert, Francis Brady, Darine Hotait, Muhammad Khudayyir, Lynn Kodeih, Mehreen Murtaza, Lea Najjar, Arjuna Neuman, and Larissa Sansour) to explore video and text exclusively, the media of choice for SF.

SCATTERING “ARAB FUTURISMS”

This curatorial formulation follows in the continuity of our most recent journey through time, which takes us to the city of Utrecht in the Netherlands during the Impakt Festival. It was October 28, 2012 when, in a small room at the Kikker Theater, an independent curator by the name of Nat Muller gave a lecture called Arab Futurism. According to her, nostalgia had permeated the Arab world for far too long, casting its veil over contemporary artistic production. However, she had observed that during the first decade of the 2000s, young artists from the Arab world had appropriated elements and temporal structures of science fiction, thereby creating alternative realities and innovative social narratives. Their intention was to weave a critical narrative by evoking themes of territory, history, geopolitics, identity, colonization, occupation, nationhood, alienation, but also possibility, hope, and resistance. What distinguishes the work of these artists is their desire to represent futures. Indeed, most of their works are tinged with dystopia, with dark, oppressive, undesirable, or chaotic societies or worlds. However, glimmers of hope pierce, here and there, the representations they depict. Nat Muller illustrated her argument with analysis of four works. 2026 (2010), by Maha Maamoun, is a short film featuring a time traveler who recounts his vision of Egypt in the year 2026 and his desire for revolution. The videos A Space Exodus (2009) and Nation Estate (2012) present Larissa Sansour’s vision of the Palestinian future, through a space exodus in the first and a futuristic skyscraper housing all Palestinians vertically in the second. In their documentary The Lebanese Rocket Society (2012), Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige provide an overview of Lebanon’s past space exploration efforts. Yet, in the final part of the film, animation takes over and imagines what the city of Beirut might have become had the Lebanese space project not been interrupted by the Six-Day War (1967) and then the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990). Collectively, these films address the contexts of Palestine, Egypt, and Lebanon projected into the near future in order to inject them into a referential illusion produced from pre-existing realities. They are very different from one another in terms of aesthetics and working methods; what unites them is their call for awareness of the future while inviting viewers to reflect.

This lecture appears to be the first time the term Arab Futurism was officially introduced. Ten years separate it from the Bozar program, which bears the same title. While the two terms appear identical, a typographic space sets them apart. Yet this particular character, which inserts an empty interval into the text, says much about its formulation. This can be explained by its frequency of use in English—a language known for its organic quality, constantly absorbing new words to create an endless stream of neologisms. If the first question raised here is whether the term Arab-futurism—with or without a space—should be accepted within the history of art, a second question concerns the language in which it is not used—Arabic—though its geography is clearly referenced in its name. Al-mustaqbal al-‘arabi does not, however, sound out of place. While artists such as Wafa Hourani, Larissa Sansour, Maha Maamoun, and Sophia Al-Maria were among the first to adapt science fiction within the register of contemporary art in the latter half of the 2000s, the subsequent arrival of this notion in English reveals the ambition of certain foreign cultural agents to assemble bodies of work in order to establish a space of differentiation. On what basis can this be determined? It could be interpreted as an attempt to deconstruct the notion of a monolithic Arab contemporary art. Indeed, this field progressively took shape at the beginning of the 21^st century, not only within the framework of the emergence of an art market in Europe and the Gulf but also in the context of a desire for dialogue between civilizations stemming from cultural diplomacy, and in the wake of the Arab revolutions and conflicts which profoundly reshaped regional geopolitics by creating new borders. These borders also carry an ideological dimension that has continually fueled a process of neo-Orientalist categorization, perpetuating a canon of otherness.

Should the reading of this art history thus begin with the study of the works themselves, or rather with the analysis of the discourses generated by the events that bring them together? A transnational and comparative approach would offer a perspective for rethinking the modes of perceiving the arts of the Arab geocultural space and their relevance to questions of the future. By placing this approach at the heart of institutional and artistic practices, it would become possible to deeply question the dynamics between knowledge and power. Contrary to Sulaïman Majali’s assertion that the strength of Arab futurisms lies in their indefinable nature, it seems rather to manifest in the recognition of the diversity of the individual voices involved—each contributing to the weaving of unique narratives, both in artistic creation and in its promotion by criticism and institutions. From this perspective, the exhibition ARABOFUTURS arrives at a timely moment. While it is one of the first events of its kind to take place in France, it also brought together three worlds of Arab futurisms: the artists, the institutional discourse, and the academy. Consequently, it opens new perspectives for discussing a phenomenon that will remain a subject of debate for some time to come.

“What if…” for Arab futurisms in art history? That is the question!

Joan Grandjean is an art historian specializing in contemporary art from the Arab world. He completed his PhD at the University of Geneva with a thesis on “Arab futurities” in contemporary art. From 2017 to 2024, he served as an academic assistant in Geneva and is currently a lecturer at the University of Rennes 2. His research explores the intersections of contemporary art, globalization, and imagined futures. His recent publications include co-editing “Photographe et Politique,” a double issue of the journal Tumultes(2023) with Prof. Dr. Christophe David, and the exhibition catalog Arabofuturs: Science-fiction et nouveaux Imaginaires (Institut du monde arabe, Paris, 2024) with Élodie Bouffard and Nawel Dehina. He is currently completing a book on Arab and Iranian artwork donations to the United Nations with Prof. Dr. Alexandre Kazerouni and Prof. Dr. Silvia Naef (2026). He is actively involved in several academic associations, notably ARVIMM and the Laboratory of Imaginaries, and co-founded the Manazir platform.

Sumac 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. If you would like to share a collaboration proposal, please feel free to write us. We warmly invite you to follow us on Instagram and to subscribe to our newsletter and stay connected.

The post A Journey Through Time is a Must! Events and Advent of Arab Futurisms (2024-2X%ø)—Joan Grandjean appeared first on Sumac Space.

The explosion of futurisms in the last three decades as transmedial movements that engage in processes of futuring (i.e. imagining and visualizing new futures) can be termed CoFuturisms. CoFuturisms include, for instance, Afro- and Africanfuturisms, Indigenous Futurisms, Aadivasi Futurisms, Chicanafuturism, Latinxfuturisms, Gulf-futurism, Arabfuturism, Sinofuturism, Desifuturism, South Asian Futurism, Dalit Futurism, Asia Futurism, Andean Futurism, Ricepunk, and Silkpunk, among many others. If one is to define CoFuturisms, it would be as follows. CoFuturisms are the assertion of three rights of equality and vision: the right of everyone to exist, the right to imagine one’s own future, and the right to difference. Such assertion is key to self-representation and a marker of separation from other identities which one might share. Self-representation is particularly important for those whose futures have been (and continue to be) colonized in various ways. Colonization may take the form of continued economic dependence resulting from the machinations of global capitalism, or the continual cycle of wars and coups resulting from geopolitical interventions by foreign powers, or, quite simply, cultural colonization that erases and obliterates other forms of thinking and being in the world.

Hence these futurisms are not tied geographically; they belong to the world as ways of being in the world. Generating their own manifestos, these CoFuturisms now resonate around the world, emanating from the cultural and artistic sphere and transforming into social and political phenomena. These futurisms engage in worldbuilding, imagining possible futures as well as rewiring historical knowledge to recognize what has been erased or left out of history. The philosophy of history as a political project has always recognized future histories as a speculative project, but in CoFuturisms futures are already historical. The apocalypses of the future, such as those resulting from planetary ecocide, are not futures to come but futures that have always been here for people living in the reality of the devastation. There are Arabfuturisms in Europe and elsewhere, just as there are Eurofuturisms in the rest of the world because these futurisms are all constitutive of the other. Difference is carving out a space of existence between worlds: to find a space for some identities that constitute us by separating us from others that constitute us, even if we belong to multiple ones.

Beyond these continuing colonizations, as many formerly colonized states and peoples transform into hegemonies and colonizing forces of their own, the explosion of futurisms is only inevitable, and likely to continue, to the point where futurisms will arise wherever human beings seek to mark their own existence. Other CoFuturisms, such as LGBTQIA2S+ Futurisms, Queer futurisms, Xenofuturisms, and Crip-Futurisms, are for that reason just as inevitable as geopolitically or ethnically oriented ones, since they too emerge from the same basic principles: the right to exist, the right to imagine, and the right to difference. CoFuturisms resist unity and are fundamentally unstable. This is necessary if they are to retain their political potential and charge, since no single movement can be a new form of unifying discourse that erases other identities to assert itself. Beyond and within CoFuturisms, which refer to these movements, lie certain fundamental ethical propositions: propositions that are referred to by the philosophical concept of CoFutures. CoFuturisms are simply an instance of these propositions. These ethical propositions termed CoFutures are generative and motile and permanently in a state of unfolding into instances such as various futurisms.

What propositions are these? To some extent, our unruly capitalization gives us away: in the “Co” of CoFutures. The “Co” of CoFutures stands for six different ethical propositions, of which three are most relevant in the discussion of CoFuturisms: complexity, coevalness, and compossibility.

Complexity is the principle of diversity, and it unmasks uniformity as a totalitarian project. This means that any form of thinking or system-building that seeks to unwrap itself into a new form of totality and unity is inherently suspect. Complexity thrives on the proliferation of identities, values, knowledges, languages, ideas, and constantly seeks new forms of becoming. Uniformity is the totalitarianism at the heart of the political project of nation states, as well as the prison of ideas: it seeks to make everyone look, act, speak, believe, eat, and think the same, and be the same in mind, body, and spirit, rather than support the proliferation of identities that we really are as beings in the world. Therefore, the prisons of totality and uniformity always contain within them the seeds of their own dissolution. Looking at CoFuturisms, it is easy to see why the constant proliferation of new movements has become a defining trait of our times: it is because even CoFuturisms suffer from the risks of being monolithic and totalitarian. As movements, they work only as long as there are temporary conditions of coming together to achieve certain political ends, but they are easy to dissolve and dissipate into ever new forms of togetherness, new futurisms, afterwards. True diversity exists in a philosophical and ethical acceptance of the death of things we consider fundamental, including our values and identities themselves.

Coevalness is the state of things being in the same time, which is perhaps only a principle of respect that challenges the spatialization and weaponization of time. Coevalness means the rejection of a value system that has long colonized the world, whereby some cultures, some people, some nations, some technologies, some religions, some gender, some species, some ways of living and being are futuristic and progressive as compared to others. Such a value system automatically privileges some over others: for instance, one religion (or lack of one) is more progressive because of its espousal of some values while another is backward because it believes in something else, or one part of the world is more advanced and futuristic than another because it has greater technological or financial resources, etc. This value system is the lifeblood of colonialism, which forces the same understanding of teleological progress to the whole world and is backed by international financial instruments, as well as military and political muscle. Coevalness does not force us to suspend our understanding of what is more efficacious or useful, or what one might simply prefer over another. It rather demythologizes time to make us recognize that everything is in the same time, rather than in different times, and values do not stem from things being in different times. It also makes us recognize that what we consider values might just be a function of the resources or the privileges we have.

Compossibility, the third co, is the principle of balance. As a term, it refers to two things being together possible. Many futures are possible, but not all futures are together possible. Some futures, say, ethnically and culturally homogenous, supremacist, and bloodline or purity-oriented futures, are just as possible as futures that aim for diversity, multiplicity, and heterogeneity. Without making a value judgment on which future is preferable, compossibility simply asks us first to recognize that both these futures are equally possible. However, these futures are not possible together since they tend to cancel each other out due to their varying demands on the future. If one is to maintain complexity and coevalness, then compossibility makes it happen by directing us to futures that are together possible. Compossible futures are where different kinds of being and becoming can thrive, where diversity is not merely skin-deep but truly open to infinite kinds of proliferation and combinations, ever evolving more layers of possibilities.

CoFuturisms, as an instance of these propositions, are in the world to proliferate rather than to contain futures. Thus, instead of thinking of CoFuturisms themselves as some sort of coming together of various futurisms, which risks turning CoFuturisms into a monolithic concept and designation, the ”Co” disrupts this coming together except as a temporary state of political affiliation, achieving certain ends and moving on to becoming something else.

Take for instance, Arabfuturism, which is a central theme of this exhibition. In his “Towards a possible manifesto; proposing Arabfuturism(s) (Conversation A),” Scotland based artist-poet Sulaïman Majali conceives of Arabfuturisms in the plural and gestures toward CoFuturistic visions rather than outlining a monolithic futurism movement. Framing Arabfuturisms as a proposition and the manifesto itself as a possibility, Majali refrains from defining the principles and guidelines of an aesthetic or political project. Indeed, in a reinterpretation of the manifesto published in 2015, an extended note explicitly delinks Majali’s conception of Arabfuturisms from its connotations of “movement” and defines futurism as a mode of “anticipating a future,” “a defiant cultural break, a projection forward into what is, beyond ongoing eurocentric, hegemonic narratives.” Rooted in counter-cultural challenges to hegemonic definitions of identity, belonging, and futurity, Arabfuturisms call for an examination and activation of alternate possibilities latent in the present to envision and create diverse futures.

In their invitation to explore different pathways to possible presents, Arabfuturisms’ propositions encapsulate CoFuturistic concerns with complexity, coevalness, and compossibility. One way in which Arabfuturisms aim at complexity is through the sustained critique of reductive and homogenized definitions of identity and belonging. Such critique addresses all forms of othering that seek to suppress the complexity and movement of diverse, entangled, and proliferating identities—or in Majali’s words, “the emergence of an autonomous hybrid sedimentation of identities” (151). Written in a polyvocal and patchy style as an ongoing conversation, the manifesto resists closures, definitions, and completion also in its form. With its emphasis on complexity and breaking down established boundaries, Arabfuturisms are more concerned with proliferating forms of becoming than with defining an ethnofuturist vision.

Searching for new forms of representation “beyond the logic of the state,” Arabfuturisms are as critical of Eurocentric and colonial discourses and Orientalist stereotypes around Arabness as they are of Arab nationalist discourses, which welcome certain identities while suppressing others (151). Moving beyond the logic of the state requires a thorough questioning and dismantling of nationalist discourses through the critical re-examination of history. Such discourses often mobilize restrictive conceptions of origins and teleological conceptions of time to claim the superiority/futurity of a group while relegating others to an insurmountable state of belatedness, backwardness, or lack. Arabfuturisms reject such hierarchical and essentialized divisions between peoples and highlight instead their coevalness. The futures are many; they are everywhere; and they are for everyone to envision and build, even if hegemonic value systems adhere to a hierarchical organization of futurity. The principle of coevalness does not accept such hierarchical divisions at face value and calls instead for an acknowledgement of the histories of dispossession and oppression that underlie power inequalities. This is why the re-examination of history and the unearthing of neglected histories are central features of many Arabfuturist works which imagine the future by rewriting the past. These works often demonstrate how hegemonic claims to the future are founded upon violent and dismissed histories of colonialism, imperialism, and racism. Arabfuturisms underscore the necessity of envisioning futures in conversation with these histories to produce new conceptions of futurity.

As an artist based in Europe, Majali’s Arabfuturist imaginary may have been inspired primarily by the experiences of discrimination faced by diasporic Arab communities in Europe. He writes, “There is something happening in Europe,” and adds “It is a citadel of illusion that has collapsed” (153). Yet, such citadels and their accompanying colonial and nationalist ideologies are not unique to Europe, and they are being challenged across the Middle East and globally by CoFuturisms. Particularly in the past decade, there has been a considerable growth in the number of authors, artists, and filmmakers who employ speculative and futuristic storytelling not only in Arabic speaking countries but also in Turkey and Iran, and their diasporas. Although the discussions around Arabfuturisms have so far focused predominantly on the work of visual artists in the diaspora, Arabfuturisms find expression also in the literature and music produced in the Middle Eastern and North African contexts. Arabic literary criticism often situates texts with Arabfuturist concerns within genre discussions on science fiction, utopia, and dystopia. Yet, many Arabfuturist texts cross genre and media boundaries; they merge classical and modern genres, colloquial and formal registers of language, and combine oral, visual, and performative modes of storytelling with writing. Arabfuturisms are CoFuturistic both in this transmediality and in the sense that their concerns extend beyond Arab identity and Europe toward a more global outlook. In seeking “collaborative genealogies” (153) that can establish solidarities with decolonization and social justice struggles elsewhere, Arabfuturisms invite us to envision different forms of becoming possible together.

References
Chattopadhyay, Bodhisattva. 2021. “Manifestos of Futurisms”. Foundation vol.50(2), no.139. 8-23.

Chattopadhyay, Bodhisattva. 2022. “Speculative Futures of Global South Infrastructures.” In  Urban Infrastructuring: Reconfigurations,  Transformations and Sustainability in the Global South. Ed. Deljana Iossifova et al. SpringerNature: Sustainable Development Goals Series. 297-208.

Chattopadhyay, Bodhisattva. 2020. “The Pandemic That Was Always Here, and Afterward: from Futures to CoFutures.” Science Fiction Studies 47.3. 338-340

Majali, Sulaïman. 2015. ‘Towards a Possible Manifesto; Proposing Arabfuturism(s) (Conversation A)’. In Cost of Freedom: A Collective Enquiry. Ed. Clément Renaud. No publisher. 151-3. http://costoffreedom.cc (accessed 01 December 2023). [The reinterpretation is available on  https://futuresofcolour.tumblr.com/post/161897827578/towards-arabfuturisms-manifesto-words-artwork]

Tabur, Merve. 2021. Ends of Language in the Anthropocene: Narrating Environmental Destruction in Turkish, Arabic, and Arab-Anglophone Speculative Fiction. Pennsylvania State University, PhD Dissertation.

Tabur, M. 2024. “Settling the Desert, Unsettling the Mirage: Urban Ecologies of Arab and Gulf Futurisms in Ahmed Naji’s Using Life.” Utopian studies, 35(1): 187-208. https://doi.org/10.5325/utopianstudies.35.1.0187

photo: Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, ‘CoFutures Motif 3: It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank’. Ħal Tarxien, 2018

Sumac 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. If you would like to share a collaboration proposal, please feel free to write us. We warmly invite you to follow us on Instagram and to subscribe to our newsletter and stay connected.

The post CoFutures—Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay and Merve Tabur appeared first on Sumac Space.

In “Transversal: Commons Tense & Antihegemonial Tactics,” Fatih Aydoğdu examines how art, media, and activism intersect to influence contemporary socio-political conditions. He argues that art’s visual language is deeply connotative, embedding cultural semantics that extend beyond mere representation. Digital arts, distinct from traditional forms, engage audiences actively, transforming art into a platform for socio-political critique. Aydoğdu highlights mass media’s role in shaping public opinion and emphasizes networked societies as new public spaces for communication. He situates art within broader socio-economic changes, advocating for its role in challenging hegemonic structures and fostering alternative social visions.

“The limits of my language…, the limits of my world …” ¹

An art practice, which operates by means of individual criteria and frame conditions, does not necessarily establish lasting (museal) merits, but creates a proper aesthetics of communication. Categories of analysis, tactical media, activist interventions react upon and/or influence the current social conditions. Via its pragmatics, swift or uncomplicated media produces a modality, which embraces the implementation of different procedures – aesthetical, activist or partly theoretical ones.

The connotative level of the visual, from the point of view of its contextual reference and positioning in different discursive meaning and association realms, denotes the point where al- ready coded signs meet the depth of the semantic code of a culture and adopt additional, more active dimensions. Here, there exists no pure objective (denotative) – and least of all natural – representation. Each visual sign (in a specific language) connotates a characteristic – a value or a conclusion – which is present depending on its connotating position as implication or implicated meaning.

The fields of preferred concepts hold social structures in the form of meanings, practices and opinions: the popular knowledge of social structures, of how all practical concerns function within this culture, of the ranking of power and interest and of the structures of legitimating, limitations and determinations. Thus, the chosen signs have to be related by means of codes to the order of the social life, to the economic, political power and the ideology, in order to make them readable. The term “reading” does not merely point at the capability to identify and decode a special number of signs, but it also addresses a subjective ability to relate these to other signs in a creative approach: a skill that is a precondition for conscious acting within an environment.

As long we can reflect upon ourselves through the world of art and reflect upon art through our world, the meaning of art can take on various forms and purposes, such as counter-balancing political conditions in the form of an upside-down-pissoir. Digital arts, takes the network society as its plane of resonance. Different than traditional/modern art, digital arts invites the audience to actively take part in the art work rather than merely provoking them. This quality is, of course, contained in the very nature of art. In a way, art functions to re-invent itself, time, and environment by responding and commenting on the socio-cultural and political contexts. By so doing, it creates other alternate visions while incorporating various available medium and technologies in order to achieve this goal. Here, politicization is not just an attitude operating through practices of production but it is an essential component of a concrete structural positioning. Art consists of a platform, which blends its field of interaction with creative, technical, and social energies by which it resolves and redefines such forces. It functions to pinpoint and question the contradictions and inconsistencies that operate within such forces that falls in its scope of analysis.

The strategies used or described in art are not limited to innovation or tradition. In this sense, each artwork may function as a ‘shifter’ among other artworks, meaning, it comments on the world on the basis of its differentiation to other artworks. From a societal perspective, this differentiation does not only function to ‘label’ the work of art according to its form (such as ‘revolutionary’, ‘innovative’, ‘epigonal’). Rather, art attains its meaning on the basis of its positioning within a certain social context, which entails artworks that are not as strongly related to the public domain such as Art in Public spaces, Street Art, mobile- applications or participatory art. Top- down-art is art that we obtain one way or another, bottom-up-art is art that we need to obtain one way or another. Each artwork is a question addressed at society at large.

Despite the common association of network society with omnipresent control and surveillance (which could perhaps explain why traditional arts tend to lean towards individualization and a-socialization), social media, network structures, and the Internet are perhaps the final “public space” that we possess as individuals today.

Massmedia (as a passive consumption device), which have rapidly influenced our everyday life since the second half of the 19th century, play a strong role in determining our agenda at present. Since the decrease in the political and social connotations of “public space” in a modernist, transparent, and cognitive society, “massmedia” has taken on a central role in the creation and dissemination of meaning, taking public opinion under its hegemony and replacing “knowledge” -so important to cognitive society- with metaphors of “meaning” and “opinions”.

Here, “public” denotes a passive monitoring formula. On the one hand, “public” designates the impossibility of going beyond the internal operations of the system; on the other hand, it points to the possibility of new types of communication with other external systems. Hence, the meaning and ideas produced by the media do not actually represent the opinion of the public.

The rapid rise of the turbocapitalist system resulting from the fall of the iron curtain in 1989 and the cold war, the loss of public commons as a result of the privatization necessary for “economic growth”, the crises of participatory democracy, the dilemma between transnationalism and nationalisms, the decrease of individual rights after 9/11 under the banner of protection from terror, religion wars, our irresponsible consumption of world resources, financial crises, bankruptcies emerging from the management of democratic states as private companies released from social responsibilities, the diminishment of working rights and essential social structures of a society, moving towards (social, political, and economic) erosion as a result of the growing gap between different classes, in society: although we may have become accustomed and insensitive to the daily catastrophic images imposed on us by massmedia, we believe that this description of our current situation is not exaggerated.

¹ Ludwig Wittgenstein: Tractatus logico-philosophicus

This text is published before, in the catalogue of the Exhibition “Commons Tense/Müşterekler Zamanı” (amberTXT/BIS), Curated by Fatih Aydoğdu and Ekmel Ertan, Den Haag/NED 2012
In frame of the Todays Art Festival 2012 

By connecting social media with discussions on ecology, society, and participatory democracy from a social organizational perspective, “Commons Tense/ Müşterekler Zamanı” establishes an alternative platform for re-constructing urgent societal questions, to search for solutions to existing and future crises, to advocate the need for self-organization within the hegemony of market economy, which privatizes all aspects of everyday life.

Digital Commons are platforms offering tools, information, theory, art, and culture that are open for public and are free. Commons are what we share with others. Commons/ Müşterekler is a new form of expression that goes beyond the hegemony of the market and centralized modes of control and, therefore, it is a kind of language.

“Commons Tense / Müşterekler Zamanı” designates a hypothetical language that goes beyond local and national data to discuss certain problems, and to produce alternative options within the current social, economic, and political systems in which we live in.

It establishes a foresight to think beyond borders physically and intellectually, within and without the system.

https://issuu.com/ekmelertan/docs/commons_tense

Fatih AYDOĞDU (b. 1963 | Turkey) lives and works in Vienna and Istanbul. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul and graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Aydoğdu is a conceptual visual artist, designer, curator, writer, and sound artist, focusing on concepts of media aesthetics, migration & identity politics, and linguistic issues. He participated in numerous exhibitions throughout Europe, Asia, and the USA. He was the publisher of Turkey’s first media art magazine, “hat” (1998). He worked a.o. as a member of the Curatorial Board of ‘amberPlatform,’ an art & technology platform based in Istanbul, between 2011 and 2019.

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It was in March 2015 that I noticed for the first time a missing person’s poster. I was waiting for the tube in London. I stared long at that face in the poster, trying to memorize it, wondering whether I could later recognize it. That evening, I began an intense and emotional journey as I became obsessed with the ongoing search for a boy who disappeared thirty-five years ago.

K was a sixteen-year-old boy living in the south of London. One night in March 1986, he walked out of his house to visit the local grocery store. He was never seen ever since. Twenty-nine years later, I was standing in front of his house, only to discover that not only he has disappeared, but the neighborhood he once knew has likewise vanished. His family no longer owned his home. His school was demolished. The store is now a restaurant. Even the police station where he was reported missing is no longer operating.

My experience studying documentary photography in London that year was centered around my investigation of this cold case. I was collecting archival material from newspaper snippets, police documents, missing persons’ appeals, and blog posts discussing K’s unresolved disappearance. I was particularly struck when I discovered the ongoing search led by K’s younger sister. Until today, she continues to spread appeals hoping for closure, hoping to see her now assumed fifty-one-year-old brother.

The curiosity driving my research led me to philosophical readings about sight, invisibility, and not knowing. As I  wondered about how the search is for both a sixteen-year-old boy and a fifty-one-year-old man, I was reading about Schrödinger’s cat and the state of quantum superposition. And when I encountered the age-progressed computer-generated portrait of K, I was reading about the mythical Gorgons with faces that no one can look at. The more I delved into such contemplations, the more I returned to the same question: What truly lay at the centre of my obsession?

It was quite late at night, a few hours before dawn.
There was a full moon lighting the sky
and casting shadows on the ground.
Soft wind stroked a layer of sand from time to time.
Other than that, barely anything else moved around
until I heard a sound coming from afar.
I did not wonder for long what it was,
for then I saw a man rushing towards the valley.
His pace was fast, and at once, I recognized his face.
He came here years ago, and just like now,
he looked as if he had been walking towards someone else,
someone he could not wait to be nearby.  
—Excerpt from the book’s mystical tale

My journey, which began in the south of London in the winter, brought me to the Sinai peninsula in Egypt in the summer. There, I was retracing a mystical tale I had read in the Quran: The collapse of a mountain in the presence of Moses who asked to see a glimpse of God, despite being allowed to hear Him. At the centre of this tale, I  saw the human dependence on sight, in spite of which faith is paradoxically formulated. In juxtaposition, the ongoing search for K by his younger sister with appeals featuring his age-progressed face became a reflection of the strength of faith in the face of uncertainty.

By the end of my study in London, I had put together several publications. I made seven zines, each exploring an aspect of K’s case. I designed two booklets titled The Search for the Invisible In a Space of Infinite Possibilities I and II. In Part I, I curated the archival textual and visual research material I had been collecting. For Part II, I made a series of photographs which I embroidered that retrace the search for K. With the embroidery, I invited the reader to reveal the photographs hidden behind the threads. As for the tale in Sinai, I juxtaposed it with the case in London in a photobook titled The Invisible: Faith as a Phenomenon. In their totality, these handmade books acted like a research dossier that reflected my obsession with what it means to search for what the eye cannot see.

Six years later, I decided to revisit these publications with the intention to transform their essence into a concise narrative. Instead of several booklets that reflect the complexity of this multi-faceted project, I wanted to design a new book that would invite a more immersive experience. And so, I began to conceptualise the book’s form, layout, and binding technique. I re-edited the photographic narrative, focusing on how best to interweave the tale from Sinai with the case from London. I reworked the epilogue’s essay and wrote a story narrated from the perspective of a mountain to illustrate the mystical tale. Then, I focused particularly on further developing the embroidering concept.

With a Stitch-Me edition for the resulting book titled Let My Eyes Have a Glimpse of you, I am inviting the readers to embroider the photographs themselves. Using red thread referring to what the missing boy was wearing,  the embroidery accentuates areas within the photographed scenes. It acts as a tactile invitation to imagine what may have happened in this cold case. As the book readers engage with the intimate and time-consuming practice of stitching, I hope they reflect on the long and difficult journey traveled by those longing for years to see the faces of their loved ones.

Sara Sallam (1991) is an Egyptian multidisciplinary artist, designer, visual researcher, and book maker based in the Netherlands. She works with photography, video, and writing, often re-appropriating and manipulating archival material to invite hidden meanings to emerge. Themes of absence, loss, and longing run throughout her work in which she explores ways of visualizing things we cannot see and portraying people we can no longer meet.

If you’d like to learn more about Sara’s work, visit her website, subscribe to her free newsletter, or join her on Patreon to read similar insights into her process.

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The post On Seeing, Searching, and the Book “Let My Eyes Have a Glimpse of You”—Sara Sallam appeared first on Sumac Space.