Zozan
Exhibitions

The ZOZAN team organized artistic interventions based on the digitized selection of the material of Finke and Emir.

Experienced artists were invited to examine the collections and to realize a piece of art either within a period of about three weeks or over a university term. During the residency each artist conducted a workshop with a group of invited participants. The workshops were organized at various locations in Austria, Germany, France, Turkey and the Autonomous Region of Kurdistan Iraq, and lasted from one weekend to five months.

The artists and the respective results of the workshops covered a wide range of topics: individual memories (often characterized by violence and loss) and their connection to collective memories as shaped by silence and repression; the recent challenges in the Kurdish countries of origin that lead to migration, such as large dam projects; gender-specific violence; labor exploitation in the countries of residence, coupled with the invisibility of migrant communities; the impossibility of expressing oneself artistically; the loss of cultural heritage, the destruction of traditional knowledge and the absence of institutions to preserve both.

The artistic works ranged from the design of stamps for a nation without a state to the artistic processing of ethnographic photos, the sculptural reworking of everyday objects in stone, sound recordings of individual memories, videos, re-enactments of traditional practices such as butter-making, conceptual works, installations, literary adaptations, drawings and paintings. They were presented to the public in solo exhibitions after the workshops and finally as a complete show. A brochure with several pages was created for each workshop, which documents both the artistic presentation and the entire workshop and will finally be incorporated into a catalog at the end of the project.

Workshop 01Lisl Ponger

Workshop 02Songül Boyraz

Workshop 03Rojda Tuğrul

Workshop 04Thomas Freiler

Workshop 05Savaş Boyraz & Dugyu Örs

Workshop 06Ezgi Erol

Workshop 07Daro

Workshop 08Melis Kaya

Workshop 01

Lisl Ponger

The research project ZOZAN hosted its first art–based workshop in Vienna on two weekends in May 2022. Under the direction of the artist Lisl Ponger, a group of twelve participants discussed various topics on Kurdish everyday life: memory culture, migration, socio-economic transformations of their regions of origin, geopolitical developments, experience of violence, loss, and identity. The group was composed of Kurds from various nation states of the Kurdish settlement area as well as other interested participants. Guided by the artist, the group addressed a broad spectrum of themes and visualized them through associative research. The participants were invited to bring objects, pictures and mementos, and to create four sheets of stamps depicting the wide-ranging topics discussed. As a starting point of the visual representation served two comprehensive multimedia collections – the Werner Finke Collection and the Mehmet Emir Collection. In collective processes, the workshop group decided for a selection of visual materials and created new images through scans of objects and paintings. The artist’s suggestion to create sheets of stamps met with great enthusiasm among the participants, as the medium of stamps addresses different levels of statelessness and transnational connections. The discussions followed equal, non-hierarchical points of view; decisions on the design of the artworks were made in democratic votes and guided by aesthetic considerations. The importance of contextualizing the motifs so as not to convey a one-sided impression of everyday Kurdish culture was also discussed. The focus  was on rural culture and mementos from the diaspora, although there were and are various urban Kurdish cultures and youth cultures. The collaboratively created artistic works were presented to the public at the Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art in December 2022.

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Workshop 02

Songül Boyraz

In the course of a one-week stay in Vorarlberg, Austria, in June 2022, Vienna-based artist Songül Boyraz developed a video work with members of local Kurdish communities. In conversations and music performances at several venues—vorarlberg museum, Open Youth & Cultural Work Bregenz, and Free Alevis Vorarlberg in Weiler—they discussed various topics, such as identity, being foreign, loss of homeland, and memory. The artist then conducted individual conversations and recorded these interviews on video. In the film, these conversations are interwoven with archival material from the Werner Finke and Mehmet Emir collections. Together with autobiographical material from her own family archive, Songül Boyraz created a 28-minute film entitled Remembering ZOZAN (“Memories of the Summer Pastures”).

The film was presented to the public in October 2023 at vorarlberg museum in Bregenz.

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Workshop 03

Rojda Tuğrul

The third ZOZAN art-based workshop took place under the direction of the artist Rojda Tuğrul at the Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art (Vienna) in November 2022. This workshop spoke to people with experience of dispossession as well as people carrying the memories of dispossessed ancestors. It initiated a modest exercise of imagining different worlds within the world we live in. The workshop participants were encouraged to creatively explore the ZOZAN multimedia materials using their senses and contributing drawings, photos, texts, oral history as well as audio and video recordings. Rojda Tuğrul challenged the workshop participants to think about the following questions: How do we speak with or listen to the land we live in? How can we develop a connection to the new land we are relocated or forced to move to? Can we facilitate a new story that envisions the past or future? Rojda Tuğrul followed artistic approaches of “Re-Animating” and “On Touching”. She elaborated with the participants how we can activate certain relationalities, disparities and entanglements in and through our body. She explored whether drawing can be a method to form new connections as an extension of our memories and to create new memories. Aside from further methods such as “deep listening”, the workshop focused on the shaping of personal narratives. The collaboratively created artistic works were presented to the public at the Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art in December 2022.

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Workshop 04

Thomas Freiler

The fourth ZOZAN art intervention took place at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna as part of the methods seminar “Photography IV” under the direction of Thomas Freiler from early March to late June 2023. The students used multimedia collections to explore photography in the context of digitization and archiving, and discussed the importance of an ethnographic archive for the communities of concern. In addition to discussing scientific and artistic approaches, the seminar participants worked on artistic reflections of the collections: the basic idea was to conceive art projects based on the collection material and to implement them by the end of the term.

After a broad discursive discussion with the topic, the students engaged in individual artwork and collective art processes, which were also based on participation. Kurds and non-Kurds were presented parts of the collection and finally invited to participate in a collective re-enactment of a particular female household activity—churning butter. The participants’ own physical experience, the haptic approach to knowledge transfer, and a new multimedia documentation of this “butter workshop”—conducted at the Academy of Fine Arts under the guidance of Zeynep Kaplan—reflected the extensive range of what is possible in an art-based approach with regard to memory, experience, tradition, and the social sphere. The individual works followed different sociological and artistic approaches.

The Buttermaking-Workshop took place on June 17th, 2023 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.

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Workshop 05

Savaş Boyraz
&
Duygu Örs

The fifth art-based ZOZAN workshop took place under the direction of the artist Savaş Boyraz and the curator Duygu Örs at the “Museum am Rothenbaum – World Cultures and Arts” (in short: MARKK) in June 2023. The leaders of the workshop focused on the meaning of archives and museum collections, and reflected about already existing and imagined archives as well as archives as they might be created in the future. They pursued the following questions: How do we, as migrant dwellers of modern European cities, relate to images of our distant and near past? How should we find our way in a (now or perhaps future) foreign land? What kind of knowledge repertoires do we draw on?

The starting point of the workshop was the intriguing combination of two multimedia collections on Kurdish pastoral life by Werner Finke and Mehmet Emir as well as ethnographic artifacts from the MARKK collection. The participants analyzed selected contents from the multimedia collections and discussed them in a broader socio-political meaning. They shared parts of their own private archives (photos, objects) and explained their individual meanings. In a next step, the artist and the curator encouraged participants to contribute to collective artworks mainly by using drawing techniques.

In the exhibition “ZOZAN Tracing Spaces” at the MARKK’s experimental space “Zwischenraum” materials and outcomes of this encounter are arranged in a construction that traces Kurdish tents. In a playful yet critical interaction with the given museal space, visitors are invited to engage in reflections on the politics of representation and subjectivity in an archival context.

The exhibition Zozan: tracing traces at Zwischenraum (MARKK Hamburg) was running from October 6th, 2023 to January 7th, 2024.

 

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Workshop 06

Ezgi
Erol

In November 2023, the sixth ZOZAN art intervention took place at Schaumbad Freies Atelierhaus Graz under the direction of artist Ezgi Erol. The participants explored forms of memory and spaces of remembrance using the multimedia collections. Far beyond attempted interpretations and analyses of the photographic and film material, the participants exchanged their very personal memories of family biographies and relationships to Kurdish regions. In addition, commonalities in the effects of large-scale construction projects (dam projects) were highlighted and influences on nature and habitats were made visible.

The workshop also revealed the possibilities offered by an art-based approach. It was the creation of a common space, where memories could be exchanged and different forms of artistic expression could be tried out. A broad discursive discussion was followed by individual works, which were finally brought together to form a collective work and a joint presentation.

The resulting exhibition ZOZAN – T`RÄUME at Schaumbad Freies Atelierhaus Graz took place from January 20th to February 17th, 2024.

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Workshop 07

Daro

The seventh arts-based ZOZAN workshop took place in Slemani (Autonomous Region Kurdistan Iraq) under the direction of the curator DARO in collaboration with artists Halgurd Ahmad, Hoshang Bahjat, Karzan. A. Jan, Layla Qadir & Kosar Majeed, Niga Salam, Sabah Ahmed and Srusht Omer from December 2023 to February 2024. The workshop was held in Kurdish and English and took place in intense online exchange with the ZOZAN team. The curator and the nine artists focused on the drivers of migration (such as water shortage in the Middle East and dam projects), various environmental issues, questions of traditional forms of mobility, such as transhumance and its transformations, and the related loss of knowledge systems. Moreover, the workshop addressed the working worlds of women as a key topic of discussion and art. The preservation of cultural heritage (above all material culture) and the shaping of memory systems were of further relevance. The starting point of the workshop were two multimedia collections of Werner Finke and Mehmet Emir, which depict socioeconomic developments and the transformations in the northern Kurdish-inhabited areas. For the participants of the workshop – all from the southern regions of the Kurdish territories – these collections evoked many discussions and intense research. The participating artists came together as a collective in the course of the project. They decided to create individual art projects with different methodological and artistic approaches. The various artwork was realized during and after the workshop and arranged in an exhibition, curated by DARO, at ESTA Gallery in Slemani (Sulaymaniyah) from 18 May 2024 to 18 June 2024.

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Workshop 08

Melis
Kaya

The eighth arts-based ZOZAN workshop took place under the direction of curator Melis Kaya at the Kurdish Institute of Paris in March 2024. The workshop spoke to people interested in modern Kurdish history, visual anthropology, memory studies, and storytelling.

Related to the fact of “statelessness”, Kurds often witness only the path of “official” memory and historiography, and experience practices of silencing, denial, and the obligation of “disremembering”. Melis Kaya encouraged the participants to discuss their collective and personal memories, to explore (un)written Kurdish histories, and to document and re-establish their collective and personal memories, which have often been subjected to official historiography or governing powers. In order to find a form of representation of these often suppressed and untold memories, the group collectively explored the photographic collections of Werner Finke and Mehmet Emir, their personal archives, and the Kurdish Institute’s collection as well as multimedia materials, art production, literature, social sciences and journalistic archives.

The curator aimed to accomplish a new reading of history and memory, focusing on the facts upon which the participants constructed own memories and identities, apart from what they were taught, imposed or even exposed to.

In the course of the workshop, Adnan Dilovan Kegi, Aram Tastekin, Asmin Buhan, Dilan Salik und Meltem Yildiz produced three-dimensional memory boards, connecting Kurdish modern history and identity experiences, archival materials, the multimedia collections, and their personal memories.

The Institut Kurde de Paris opened a three-week-long exhibition on June 15th, 2024.

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