Salwa Aleryani / Jala Wahid

Salwa Aleryani
Far from closing the circle
January 28–March 12, 2023

Moving between a water tank, a fountain, a roundabout, and a penny press, Salwa Aleryani’s exhibition Far from closing the circle follows a trail of artefacts and symbols, which serve as protagonists of national narratives, or as carriers of value, marked by events that express political aspirations and power relations across geographies. Stops include: the printing plate of a postage stamp that was created to commemorate Yemen’s admission to the United Nations, but never released. Another presents an exchange of letters between the Royal Mint and the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen central bank, Masraf Aden, as well as illustrations on banknotes, which trace back to a German composer and photographer.

Bricks treated with Qadad plaster form a round border through the Kunstverein’s exhibition space, a wall-like structure that could be under construction, or equally, in ruin. Aleryani shifts from bird’s-eye view to close-up, giving attention to the individual stones of a building and the individual coins of a currency; the inconspicuous carriers of built landscapes and capital, from which in turn social spaces with their structures arise. How could they be shaped and minted, so that they become the substance of the narratives, needs and desires of those who inhabit these spaces?

Aleryani engages with places and materials through constellations of found and made objects, along with the stories, hopes and promises they hold. She creates fragmentary spatial narratives by bringing together things and images in which infrastructures and social relationships manifest. They are condensations of everyday worlds, traces of historical events or anticipations of that which is yet to be realised, containing within them the contradictions of modernisation and the fragility of the future. Far from closing the circle is Aleryani’s first institutional solo exhibition in Germany.

Salwa Aleryani lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

Curated by Heinrich Dietz

Jala Wahid
April 1–May 14, 2023

How can history be told and preserved if it intrinsically eludes the Western idea of nation-statehood? How can events be depicted that remain largely invisible (and deliberately so) in the present? With her first institutional solo exhibition in Europe, Jala Wahid builds on her previous research on the pernicious ramifications of colonial occupation and seeks answers to both a supposed speechlessness and the challenges of inconsistency in the context of Western and Kurdish politics.

At Kunstverein Freiburg, Wahid particularly dedicates her attention to Kurdish arts and archaeology examining the enduring effects of British, French and US-American imperialism, whilst exploring the potentials of theatrical and performative modes of resistance. The site-specific jailed bull sculptural installation housed in the Kunstverein exhibition space refers to the Kurdish performance ritual of Mîrmîran. Involving the election of a mock King instating mandatory laws, Mîrmîran was considered politically subversive by British occupation forces and subsequently banned in the 1920s. In the gallery above, a deck of aluminium-cast playing cards responds directly to the equivalent deck created by the Department of Defence, encouraging the US military’s preservation of archaeology during the Iraq invasion. Artefacts from Mesopotamia, and modern-day Greater Kurdistan, now on display in London or Paris or still missing after the US military invasion of Iraq, are some of those that Wahid now re-collects and expands upon in direct opposition to the illegal excavations and looting of archaeological finds.

Within political and linguistic fragmentations as well as questions of belonging and nationality, Western paternalistic politics of preservation and memory are critically negotiated. Wahid takes on the contradictions, the diffuseness and complexity of diasporic reality and drafts an alternative to rigid, White historiography, a counter-narrative that can be transformative and self-empowering, forged by resilience and self-positioning.

Jala Wahid lives and works in London, United Kingdom.

Curated by Theresa Roessler.