There is no outside-text.
The trace is not a presence but the simulacrum of a presence that dislocates, displaces, and refers beyond itself.¹
_Jacques Derrida

Field of Vision… Field of Narrative
Yasmin Nourbakhsh’s works are not isolated objects but situational configurations: each generates a situation—a perception, a memory, a narrative. These are layered and liminal, occupying a space neither fully here nor there—mirroring where the artist lives: between Iran and the UK, between languages and memories; never entirely in one place.

Yasmin Nourbakhsh’s work explores politics on a microscale, revealing it in the empty space where a pattern might have continued or in a colored shadow falling from glass. Rather than emphasizing slogans or grand icons, Nourbakhsh shifts our field of attention. In her art, politics is about how attention is regulated: she displaces the center and margin, alters intensity, and plays with light and dark.

Trace, Erasure, Palimpsest
Derrida uses the term trace for that subtle sign of absence that simultaneously enables meaning and its indeterminacy. Derrida’s trace signals both presence and absence; it always points beyond itself, remains unstable, and keeps meaning alive through continual interaction with other signs. In Nourbakhsh’s works, traces appear as thin layers of erased paint or partially covered images. Rather than stabilizing form, she suspends it; rather than making narrative uniform, she emphasizes ruptures. The work becomes a palimpsest: earlier writings emerge beneath the new—erased yet present, spectral.

Walter Benjamin, when writing about “the true image of the past that flees in fragments and signs,” articulates precisely this logic: history is neither linear nor continuous; it shines in the flashes of moments, in fragments and seemingly insignificant grooves. Nourbakhsh frames these small sparks by shifting minor elements—a piece of vintage glass, an incomplete pattern, a faded floor plan, or a sliced map—inviting the viewer to listen to the fragment rather than merely observe the whole; a fragment that carries history.

Erasure in Nourbakhsh´s practice is not merely a formalistic gesture; it is not merely folding a surface for beauty, but rather revealing the politics of concealment. Erasure in her work is both an aesthetic and epistemic strategy: by removing parts of a pattern, covering sections of an image, she raises the question: What is seen? What is erased? Who decides? These questions mark the point where the critique of representation begins.

Selective Perception
Every perception is selective. We see the world through filters we conceal: visual habits, media, collective memory, cultural biases. Nourbakhsh makes this selectivity the subject of her work. The repetition of motifs and modular grid form, when deliberately broken or incomplete, draws attention to the act of choice itself: a pattern can continue but is interrupted; why and how? A background sound may rise but remain on the threshold of audibility; for what reason? These threshold zones are the liminality of perception: boundaries where seeing/not seeing occur simultaneously, forcing the viewer to recalibrate their position.

This selective perception in Nourbakhsh’s work extends beyond the material itself; it also carries the memory of the material—what touches a fabric recalls, what scratches a glass retains, and the paths colored threads have followed—each element becoming part of the work’s logic. Nourbakhsh works with tactile sensitivity: slow, precise, with deliberate pauses and thoughtful returns. In her work, memory and material engage in a dynamic dialogue; as a living archive, memory transforms from outcome to process, from action to being.

Nourbakhsh brings this duality to the surface: the beauty of a pattern beside the wound of erasure; symmetrical repetition alongside a gap of removal. In this sense, her works become a space where beauty and wound coexist, where the viewer moves from formal fascination to a deeper political inquiry.

In-betweenness and liminality
Nourbakhsh lives in a diasporic condition. This in-betweenness is not just geographical; it shapes the work’s being. Her work and life are dual and multilayered: languages overlap, translations slip, signs shift—Persian/English, text/sound, image/word. Translation is not a solution for understanding; form becomes difference. Where pattern is complete, a gap appears; where narrative takes shape, silence arises; where material seems familiar, something foreign emerges.

Meanwhile, the presence of the Others from East in West—a subject discussed by Edward Said—is actively staged in Nourbakhsh’s work. Said argued that the Eastern Other (here: the West Asian Other)

In Western representational history, it is always constructed under the influence of power. Nourbakhsh reverses this logic: rather than aligning signs to confirm cultural expectations, she displaces and disrupts them. Familiar patterns are left incomplete, pleasant colors are juxtaposed with material silence, and nostalgic narratives are interrupted by signs of anxiety.

Her work disrupts the game of representation: instead of the East appearing as a consumable image in cultural vitrives, the vitrives themselves become sites of inquiry. Patterns, geometric motifs, and bright colors, stained glass: rather than fixed markers of authenticity, they become tools of critique. Here, the artist is not an exoticized subject but an agent of meaning; someone who disrupts the rules of seeing and shifts the position of the dominant gaze.

Nourbakhsh’s works create liminal spaces: thresholds between presence/absence, seeing/not seeing, speaking/silence. These manifest in the material (semi-transparent glass, worn fabric, unstable paint), form (incomplete patterns, disrupted geometry, broken frames), and meaning (narratives that begin but continue through the viewer). The audience becomes a co-author, filling gaps and generating meaning through their engagement.

Liminality shapes the ethics of engagement: Nourbakhsh’s work stands between formal pleasure and political provocation, keeping viewers at the threshold. This is also a curatorial gesture: the display creates a rhythm of near/far, light/dark, sound and silence/silence so that being on the threshold is experienced.

Thinking Material
Material memory is a term describing Nourbakhsh’s relationship with material and effective image transfer. The painting surface, ineffective Quartz, masked edges, dust, and paint stains all carry time. Material is not merely something to work with; it is a deposit of time. Nourbakhsh treats material not as a servant of ideas but as a co-thinker. Hence, the acts of touching, washing, masking, collaging, cutting, removing, and placing all become conceptual gestures.

This organic quality of pattern is evident: patterns grow, are cut, regrow; like plants, like skin, like memory. When a pattern is erased, its trace remains; when removed, its absence becomes active; when repeated, meaning transforms. This repetition/erasure simultaneously tests the semiotic system and our perceptual system.

Two Metaphors of Life-Space
The Iranian Garden and carpet in Nourbakhsh’s works serve as spatial metaphors that weave the themes of memory, refuge, and order. The carpet is the portable ground of the home; a soft geography on which we sit, sleep, and narrate. The carpet is a site of memory: fibers record footsteps; knots count moments. In Benjaminian reading, the carpet is “a miniature stage of history”: fragmented, layered, with margins and gaps. Nourbakhsh removes this scene from mere decoration, turning it into a site of inquiry: which narratives are fixed on the carpet’s surface and which are lost in its pile?

The Iranian Garden, with its fourfold layout, waterways, light, and shadow, is reread in Nourbakhsh’s work as a site of control and uncertainty. The garden embodies a desire for heavenly order amidst worldly disorder; yet nature always overflows: a branch outside the line, a root breaking stone, water seeking its own course. Nourbakhsh exploits this duality: geometric patterns of the garden sit alongside organic growth patterns, showing that every order speaks with the life of disorder within itself.

From Trace to Recognition
Yasmin Nourbakhsh’s works employ strategies that ultimately lead to recognition: the recognition of memory traces in material, the recognition of erasure as a tool of seeing, and the recognition of the Other as the viewer. This recognition is not a nostalgic return to origins, but an invitation to live with gaps: gaps in languages, geographies, and narratives.

Nourbakhsh, as artist/researcher, demonstrates how beauty can be apprehended—without overlooking politics—and how politics can be enacted—without sacrificing formal subtlety. Through the economy of layering and erasure, the rhythm of repetition and rupture, and her sensitivity to material and time, she creates an experience where the audience not only sees but also thinks, hears, touches, and remembers.

What remains is “art as a living archive”: an archive that asks what is seen and why, what is erased and how, what remains and at what cost. And also “art as threshold”: a place to stand, pause, pass; a site where new possibilities of perception and dialogue are opened.

Nourbakhsh reminds us that memory is never fully present, yet its trace remains in material; repetition is never flawless, yet erasure aids seeing; the Other is never merely an object but can be a subject of the gaze; and text is never alone, always breathing in a network of other texts. It is in this networked breath that her works grow: organic, resilient, continuously reweaving themselves; like a garden whose geometry is meticulously arranged yet surprises with new growth each morning.

Pariya Ferdos[se]
Tehran, Semptember 2025

References

• ¹Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference, Translated by Ahmad Aram, Tehran: Nashr-e Ney, p. 45.
• Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1968.
• Said, Edward. Orientalism. Trans. Dr. Abdolrahim Gavaahi, Tehran: Nashr-e Farhang-e Eslami.
• McAfee, Noel. Julia Kristeva. Trans. Mehrdad Parsa, Tehran: Nashr-e Markaz.
• Benjamin, Walter. The Author as Producer. Translated by Iman Ganji and Keyvan Mahtadi, Tehran: Nashr-e Zavosh.
• Adorno, Theodor, Judith Butler, and Georg Lukács. The Politics of Essays. Translated by Saleh Najafi, Morad Farhadpour, Reza Rezaei, and Amir Kamali, Tehran: Nashr-e Ney.
• Benjamin, Walter. On Language and History. Selection and Translated byMorad Farhadpour and Omid Mehregan, Tehran: Nashr-e Hermes.
• Noorbakhsh, Yasmin. Who Is It That Can Say Who I Am?: Reconfiguring Art in a Liminal Space. Critical Model dissertation

The post Halos of History and Memory: Threshold Rhythms in Yasmin Nourbakhsh’s Works—Pariya Ferdos[se] appeared first on Sumac Space.

Davood Madadpoor. From what you said, Radicals Between Trees and Dicks is the result of several years of research you’ve done into the queer cruising culture in Azerbaijan, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. You visited around thirty different cruising spots—parks, saunas, and other hidden places. There, you spoke with people who shared their stories and experiences. You also included your memories in the work. All of this came together in a video composed of eleven acts. In it, you blended these personal stories with the broader social and political pressures that queer people face in these regions. Five dancers were cast to choreograph and perform the collected stories, giving them physical and emotional presence. In addition, you referred to Azerbaijan’s cinematic history.Can you walk us through these acts, your process, and how they are interconnected?

Agil Abdullayev. All eleven acts in the film form a constellation rather than a sequence, not built to be read linearly, but to be felt relationally. Each act arises from a mode of queer endurance—looking, waiting, touching, withdrawing, fleeing—not as narrative events but as psychic and bodily states that recur across space and time. They do not resolve; more likely, they resurface.

The research spanned over thirty cruising locations across Azerbaijan, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, including public toilets, abandoned parks, shadowed forest paths, and saunas reclaimed in silence. I approached these sites as unstable topographies—sometimes haunted, sometimes overflowing, and always in flux. At times, some existed only as memories, carried in the voices of those who once moved through them. These sites became intervals—temporal clearings opened by desire and risk, emerging only under certain conditions: dusk, solitude, heat, fear, and proximity.

I tried to gather at least one audio interview from each location, but this wasn’t always possible. Sometimes it was unsafe, or people declined to participate. In those cases, what remained were my own observations. These were fragments written down hours later, gestures remembered by the body rather than captured by voice. Absence became a kind of data, a material in its own right—charged, resistant, opaque. These were developed into performances. 

These acts are what I consider emotional architectures—ways people relate through repetition, breath, and rhythm. The film unfolds choreographically. Acts collapse, recur, and reconfigure. This structure mirrors the affective rhythm of cruising, a practice of seeking connection that rarely moves in a straight line. Cruising is elliptical: it loops, waits, and doubles back. This is why the film carries that same rhythm—in structure and breath.

In performance, working with queer performers was essential. They did not need personal histories of cruising in parks or clubs, such as LAB in Berlin. Instead, they needed to understand the subtleties of queer language and hold ambiguity without explanation. I wasn’t interested in literal reenactment. We also used micro-gestures from interviews—shifting a jacket, turning a face, or slowing a step. These gestures carried memory and passed from one body to another, like oral traditions. Dancers became vessels, interpreting emotional charge instead of narrative content.

Each act is shaped around a particular weight or frequency. Act I is not an introduction, but a disorientation—an invitation to dwell inside uncertainty. Later acts hold heavier political tension, but never address it directly. Even the most charged sequences maintain some opacity. The acts are linked by tonality, not plot—like movements in a score. In that sense, the film is more a fugue than a documentary. Its structure allows memory, fear, shame, and desire to blend into each other without the need for resolution.

I didn’t want to map cruising spaces in a documentary sense. I wasn’t interested in cartography, but in conditions. What must be true—socially, politically, sensorially—for these spaces to appear? In this way, Radicals Between Trees and Dicks becomes less a film about cruising, and more a film that cruises. It drifts between textures of vulnerability and resistance. The film touches histories both personal and collective, and always remains slightly out of reach.

Davood. You work across film, photography, and painting, each with its strength—film’s temporal flow, photography’s stillness, and painting’s material presence. How do you use the special qualities of each to explore queer life, and how do they come together or clash in your work?

Agil. I don’t start with a medium. Instead, I begin with a question that slowly inhabits many forms. Painting, photography, performance, sculptural installation, and moving images don’t work in isolation for me. They are part of one ongoing body, each leaking into the others. A painted surface might still come from a video still. A filmic movement might mirror absence within a photograph. These references build until boundaries between media collapse.

Art is the only language I know that allows me to be heard without needing to fully explain myself. It’s how I make sense of what cannot always be said. Each medium in my practice is a way to approach silence. Photography’s stillness allows contemplation of erasure. Painting’s texture gives weight to absence. Film—being durational—allows the effect to unfold in fragments. This intermediality is essential to my practice. It reflects how queer life itself cannot be contained in a single form or narrative thread.

Davood. Your films begin in personal histories—childhood memories, diary entries—and grow into shared archives where individual and collective memories mix. In which moments or through which methods do you choose to blur the line between your own story and the broader queer archive? How does this merging open up new possibilities to build shared narratives? And how do you decide when to protect, distort, or reveal identities—especially in politically repressive situations?

Agil. The line between my memory and the collected archive is not something I intentionally blur. It becomes porous through how I approach people and experiences in research. I don’t separate what I encounter in the field from what I carry within myself. Whether it’s a conversation with someone in a park at dusk, or the feeling of a site lingering after I’ve left, these experiences inhabit me. I approach subjects—people, gestures, or landscapes—as I would experience in my own life.

Everything we experience leaves a trace within us. Research does too. What I hear, what I witness, and what I’m trusted with all become part of the emotional architecture of the work. The boundary between personal and collective dissolves—not because I force it to, but because they are already intertwined. Memory is relational. It’s built in proximity to others. The personal and collective don’t sit side by side; they fold into each other.

In this fold, I begin to build a shared archive. It’s not one that aims for historical completeness, but one that makes room for contradiction, opacity, and feeling. The stories shared with me are not simply data or testimony. They become part of a wider, unstable terrain of queer survival.

In politically hostile contexts, especially in post-Soviet regions, visibility is always a double-edged sword. It can empower, but also expose someone to danger, violence, or erasure. Many people I spoke with requested that they not be filmed or that their voices be excluded from the recording. I respect these boundaries completely. That’s why I invite performers to embody anonymized gestures. Through this process, performers also become part of the story. Many voices in the film are re-voiced by actors or digitally altered. These distortions are not about concealment. They are acts of care, preserving intimacy without reducing it to something easily consumed.

Davood. I read that you, by revisiting “queer intimacy, self-reflection, anger, fear, and belonging,” aim to create a space of “hyper‑possibility” as sites where queer narratives aren’t handed down but actively fractured and remade. Can you elaborate on this, and how do you conceive the capacity of these hyper‑possibility spaces?

Agil. “Hyper-possibility” refers to how queer life must imagine itself beyond current conditions. In cruising, you enter a space that exists within, but also against, the city. It is part of the city, but not sanctioned. That duality creates a special imaginative force. The abandoned train yard in the final act of Radicals in Between Trees and Dicks is a scene of possibility. Will someone arrive? Will something happen? Or will you just wait and walk? That uncertainty is political because it refuses finality. In doing so, it becomes a form of hyper-possibility. It’s not just a lack of resolution. It is an opening to what hasn’t yet been imagined. This uncertainty is generative. It is full of potential for new configurations of desire, presence, and encounter.

Davood. It seems these spaces don’t deliver a single, coherent queer story but rather assemble fragmented moments that break conventional gazes and invite open room for surprise—rebellious joy, playful rage, and shared care. How does the fragmentary nature of your “hyper‑possibility” spaces generate new relational modes and emotional registers instead of simply transmitting pre‑formed queer narratives?

Agil. Fragmentation allows for multiple entry points. The film doesn’t provide a single story of queer life in the region. That would be a kind of violence. Instead, it accumulates impressions—like sweat in a shirt or the echo of footsteps in a dark corridor. 

It is a method. It is an ethic. It allows me to sidestep dominant narrative structures and instead invite the viewer into a space of emotional attunement. Fragments ask you to assemble, but they never promise completion. They invite a different kind of attention—a more sensitive, intuitive relation to the work.

Davood. You draw on Soviet‑era Azerbaijani film aesthetics—not out of nostalgia but as raw material to be re‑coded into a queer archive through appropriation and formal intervention. What specific cinematic techniques or aesthetic codes from that film history did you appropriate, and how do they function within your work to challenge or subvert their original ideological purposes?

Agil. I delved into Azerbaijani cinema from the 1960s and 1970s a long time ago, while working on another film, If the Sun Sees You, which took its point of departure from Nizami’s Seven Beauties. I was drawn to these films immediately—they seemed to speak a visual and emotional language that resonated deeply with my own practice. Those films didn’t fully serve the state narrative, but also didn’t entirely rupture from it. Beneath their ambiguity and melancholic masculinity, I sensed an artistic tension that mirrored the kind of emotional undercurrents I often explore in my work.

These films, shaped by censorship, ideology, and scarcity, developed a language that feels ripe for reinterpretation. Their theatrical blocking, static frames, and muted tones were survival strategies. I don’t approach them with nostalgia, but as unresolved codes—forms waiting to be queered. In my own work, I retain this grammar but shift its gravity—from nationalism to queer affect, from collective ideals to emotional vulnerability.

Performance becomes a site for re-reading. I also turn to Azerbaijani folk dance, not as heritage but as choreography of gender. Male dancers were trained to embody dignity, strength, and restraint—gestures tied to patriarchy and militarized masculinity. In my work, I fragment and distort these movements: a lifted chest collapses, a sharp turn slows to hesitation. What happens when such gestures are re-inhabited by queer bodies, when pride softens into tenderness?

What emerges is a counter-folklore—a choreography of deviation. The body ceases to serve the state and instead holds memory, desire, and loss. Dance becomes a way to deconstruct and reinhabit the past—not as ideology, but as emotion.

Davood. The 2022 Russian mobilization and the resulting militarized surveillance disrupted cruising circuits, turning encounters into acts of resistance. How did the war‑driven rapture of cruising under Putin’s mobilization reshape the political dimension of those spaces in your film, and in what ways do you see cruising operating as a tool of queer dissent?

Agil. The political dimension of cruising shifted dramatically over the course of the research—almost in parallel with the transformation of my own role within these spaces. When I began the project in May 2019, the terrain already felt unstable, but it was still navigable. Over the following years, so many ruptures occurred: the outbreak of COVID-19 and global lockdowns, the closure of queer-friendly bars and community venues, the hardening of borders between Azerbaijan and its neighboring countries, the growing criminalization of LGBTQ+ life across the post-Soviet region, and a general intensification of surveillance and isolation. These events changed the world around me—so organically, they changed my relationship with work.

Even my own body changed during this time. During lockdown, I gained significant weight, and that physical transformation also altered my position within cruising culture. I became less of a participant and more of a witness. This shift was deeply personal, but also methodological: it marked a move from being inside the scene to observing how scenes themselves dissolve and reassemble. The project became less about the act of cruising and more about its disappearance—its conditions, its ghosts.

But it was the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022—and especially the first military mobilization in September—that fundamentally altered the political atmosphere in the region. I was in Tbilisi when the mobilization was announced, and suddenly the city became a refuge for queer people fleeing conscription in Russia. The air was thick with fear, uncertainty, and exhaustion. People didn’t know if they would be forced back, if new borders would close overnight, or if the war would expand. The sense of instability was no longer abstract—it was in every conversation, every gaze exchanged in the dark.

Within this context, cruising shifted from being a covert act of desire to a precarious form of resistance. Meeting someone in a park or a forest clearing, in a time when borders were closing and bodies were being conscripted into violence, became a radical insistence on relationality. Cruising asserted: I still exist outside the machine of war. I still desire. I still refuse to be folded into the logic of nationalism or death.

In the film, this transformation is not dramatized; instead, it is felt. The latter acts become quieter, darker, and more anxious. Encounters are more fleeting, gestures more cautious. I didn’t feel it was ethical—or even possible—to record the rawness of these moments directly. Instead, I turned toward abstraction: sound becomes muffled, bodies are partially obscured, and choreography replaces representation. The uncertainty of the moment demanded a new form of listening, a new ethics of presence.

This period reshaped not only the content of the work but my entire methodology. It forced me to slow down, to accept disappearance as part of the process. It taught me that some stories can’t be captured, only felt around the edges. Cruising, in this sense, operates not just as a form of queer intimacy, but as a fugitive politics—one that resists state violence not through confrontation, but through persistence, through softness, through remaining unpredictable and ungovernable.

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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.

İpek Çınar: At first glance, our practices and outcomes may appear quite different, but I sense they stem from similar concerns and struggles. That makes me especially curious about this exchange. So let me start directly: How would you describe what you do at the intersection of art, participation, and politics?

Reyhaneh Mirjahani: I would describe my art practice primarily as a mode of critical investigation. Rather than positioning art as an end in itself, I approach it as a methodological and epistemological tool—one that enables me to examine and intervene in a socio-political situation, an issue, or a tension. Ideally, it serves as a mode of inquiry capable of activating forms of knowledge production that are embodied, situated, and relational.

I rarely begin with art as such. I tend to start with a question or conflict, using art to probe, study, re-read, and reframe a situation. I am especially curious about the entanglements between power, counter-narratives, ethics, and lived experience. I focus on how these forces shape one another and structure the conditions for participation, responsibility, or agency. Initially, my interest was grounded in theoretical frameworks. Over time, I have become more drawn to the capacity of artistic practice to generate alternative research modes. These modes resist abstraction and instead foreground affect, contingency, and embodied experience.

I try to approach art not only as a representation, but as a speculative and experimental space. Here, dominant logics can be discussed, redefined, or reimagined. Art enables the exploration of new ways of relating, the rehearsal of ethical positions, and the co-creation of shared meaning. I am interested in how these spaces can offer conditions for critical reflection that go beyond cognition. They are also embodied and effective. This brings the possibility of more nuanced and plural understandings of participation, responsibility, and the political. 

İpek: Your earlier works address identity and belonging through guest/host and self/other tensions, but later take on a more transnational, relational focus. Looking back, what questions or dilemmas prompted this shift in direction for you? Was it a gradual evolution or a response to particular challenges?

Reyhaneh: We grow up in systems that are keen to define our lived experiences through dichotomies. It is a way to simplify situations, and we are taught to think in the same terms. Over the years, I have shifted my attention toward what lies between these categories. I want to grasp the complexity of relationships and to resist static interpretations of events. 

This has transformed my practice. My work is no longer primarily about my own identity or position. Instead, I focus on how, as subjects, we navigate the contexts and systems in which we live. Dialogue and participation become essential. They create opportunities to explore and understand the diverse, dynamic experiences of others. At the same time, they help reveal the politics that shape participation and dialogue. 

İpek: From what you’ve described, art for you seems to exist as both something projected into the future (the not yet) and as a process that unfolds. In your participatory works, many elements are involved: planning, realization, documentation, participant input, unexpected encounters, and the tensions of the moment. All of these meet in a speculative space. With so many variables, how do you see your role in this process? For example, how do you position yourself in the room?

Reyhaneh: I would describe my role in participatory projects as a facilitator. During the preparation and development phases, I established a framework with specific elements and cues. These questions or concerns are what I want to explore with participants. These elements act as subtle guideposts, not strict instructions.

Once the work begins, I try to step back and leave space for participants to interpret and respond on their own terms. I consider this openness essential. It allows the unexpected to emerge in both content and group dynamics. Sometimes I intervene during the activation phase, usually by asking a question or subtly shifting the group’s attention. My aim is to stay responsive rather than directive. I try to inhabit a space between author and participant. This lets me guide without closing possibilities, and to unfold relationally, shaped by the moment—whether social, political, or interpersonal.

But this brings me to a key question about your own practice: How do you define your role within the Orta Okul project that you initiate? In your view, how does your positioning affect dynamics, openness, and the potential for unexpected outcomes?

İpek: Initiate is the correct word. I usually describe myself not as an artist, but as an initiator. Even this role can influence a project’s dynamics more than I expect or want to admit. My solution is to carefully specify which groups I work with and spend more time with them. I dedicate time to understanding the community’s dynamics and learning about them. Whenever possible, I exchange ideas with them before the project begins. This helps my vision align with the community’s reality and wishes.

This approach involves compromises. Instead of working in galleries, museums, or staging public interventions, I often work in spaces where the community feels safer. Sometimes, I commit to longer-term collaborations. For example, in a recent project with Orta Okul, we spent several months meeting with the community every Friday. Sometimes, we did nothing more than ask, How do you perceive what we are doing together? Ultimately, we did not produce exactly what we had planned. But the process taught us about participation, empowerment, and building connections. Some women began referring to it as our project rather than your project. A few even wanted to take the initiative to continue it independently. This was an unexpected, yet deeply valuable, outcome.

I would like to specifically focus on your upcoming work, An Experiment on Agency #8, which will be part of Acts of Conflations and is the reason we met. This project continues a series that has already engaged diverse geographies, including Latvia, the Netherlands, Italy, and Sweden. Could you discuss the overall framework of this work and how you have adapted it to various contexts? 

Reyhaneh: This work is designed to create a space where friction, disagreement, and discussion are not only possible but necessary. I have noticed that conversations around agency often get trapped in rigid dichotomies: either one has agency or one does not. In An Experiment on Agency, I seek to disrupt these binaries by foregrounding contexts in which agency is ambiguous, unstable, or constantly shifting. The work invites participants to explore subjective understandings of power and responsibility, rooted in lived experience rather than abstract definitions.

While I actively shape each version of the work based on its context, the project itself also evolves. The context not only informs the realization of the work, but also transforms it. Each iteration responds to dilemmas specific to the setting. These may relate to geography, sociopolitical conditions, or the group’s composition. During the activation phase, participants further shape the work, often steering discussions toward their own concerns and group dynamics. For example, in Riga, one participant group consisted of humanities secondary school teachers. In the Netherlands, it was a group of artists and researchers in socially oriented and academic practices. Each setting brought new questions: What kind of language emerges around the concept of agency? How do we discuss responsibility in a group of nations in conflict? What does it mean to claim neutrality? What happens when the agency shows up as refusal, withdrawal, or silence rather than action? And how do aesthetics operate in this participatory format?

İpek: Sharing agency is as challenging and risky as political, often feeling like the subject investigates you as much as you investigate it. Why is it so central to the series?

Reyhaneh: At first, I approached the agency as something granted, and I was interested in how we could exercise it. Later, during research phases, I began to question that premise entirely. Some scholars argue that agency can be imposed, involuntary, or even illusory. This was a turning point for me—not only for the project, but also for my own understanding of the concept. From there, the focus shifted toward examining different forms of agency and the structures that either limit or enable it, as well as the dilemmas and liminal spaces in between that we need to navigate.

I personally had the privilege of growing up around some activists and civic actors in my hometown of Tehran. That environment initiated many questions about our agency, responsibility, and ethics, situated between an authoritarian regime and imperial powers. For me, these questions are inseparable from my lived experience, regardless of where I am or the privileges I hold. I believe that engaging with this subject reveals much about our own subjective positions, standing in contrast to purely empirical research on the topic and challenging the binary frameworks through which the world is so often understood.

İpek: And what will you be exploring specifically in the Berlin context?

Reyhaneh: In Berlin, I am particularly interested in continuing this investigation at a time when violence is intensifying. Specifically, in the context of the ongoing genocidal acts and the immense human suffering of the civilian population in Gaza, the response we’ve seen in Germany—mirroring similar trends in some other Western countries—reveals a growing repression of protest and political movements. Within this climate, a central question emerges: how can we hold space for conflict without collapsing into consensus? And how can we meaningfully engage with the notion of agency when speaking out becomes a risk, and visibility itself can be weaponized?

I am not sure that it will open up new ways in a radical sense, but it will emphasize the already existing resources in our society: the capacity to share and to listen. I do not mean this passively; rather, it is a deliberate engagement with doubt, dilemmas, and insecurity, creating a space where these tensions can be acknowledged and discussed. The aim is not necessarily to provide answers, but to trace and understand the different structures at play in shaping experience and agency. This is what I hope to realize in the exhibition.

At the same time, I also want to acknowledge my own doubts. To what extent can conversation alone generate alternative approaches to entrenched situations? How much space can we truly give to antagonism in a context where we are still confronting the very real legacies of oppression and violence? Under what conditions, and when, are we allowed to engage in agonism, and when must we prioritize care, listening, or safety? 

I’m curious about your perspective on working in Berlin today. How do the specific conditions, tensions, and opportunities here shape the way you think about agency in your own projects? And how does this affect your work with Orta Okul or similar participatory initiatives?

İpek: What you say is extremely important and a pressing issue in Germany, one that we all face in different ways. We are confronted both with the complicity of the country we live in regarding genocide and with the hypocrisy of institutions that have benefited from post-migrant, anti-colonial, and feminist discourse, which remain silent and try to silence us. Yet we remain here, because there is no other place to go.

At Orta Okul, we have dedicated our first three years to topics related to this: Urgency (2024), Community (2025), and Resilience (2026). Our aim is to strengthen collective bonds and allocate the limited resources we or our fellows have. I find both ease and political engagement in empowering individuals, using the methods you mentioned: care, listening, and creating safer spaces, especially for those in more difficult positions. It may sound simple, but after seeing how institutions complicate these topics, I believe we need a bit of simplicity and directness. And more spaces to discuss. Perhaps for this reason, we need An Experiment on Agency now more than ever.

Reyhaneh Mirjahani is an artist working at the intersection of visual art, curating, artistic research, organizing, and publishing, focusing on participatory art. She uses collaborative, interdisciplinary approaches to create dialogic spaces exploring agency, participation, counter-narratives, and spatial politics. She holds an MFA in Fine Art from HDK-Valand, Gothenburg University, and has completed the postmaster programs Commissioning and Curating Contemporary Public Art at HDK-Valand and CuratorLab at Konstfack.

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 Holding the Dilemma, Sitting with the Question—Reyhaneh Mirjahani in conversation with 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.

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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.