How do we, as immigrant residents of modern European cities, relate to images of our distant and near past? How can a country that is now or has always been foreign be explored? And what kind of knowledge repertoires can be drawn on? In June 2023, these questions initiated an exchange on existing, imagined and future archives.

Two multimedia collections by Werner Finke and Mehmet Emir, which depict Kurdish everyday cultures and traditional livestock farming, together with ethnographic artifacts from the MARKK collection, formed the basis for a workshop with selected participants under the direction of the artist Savaş Boyraz and the cultural scientist and art educator Duygu Örs.

The exhibition “Zozan: tracing traces” will rearrange themes and materials from this encounter in a construction that follows the Kurdish Zozan tents [Kurdish: summer pasture] into the present. In a playful and at the same time critical interaction with the given museum space, visitors are invited to engage with the politics of representation and subjectivity in an archival context.

The workshop and exhibition are part of the art-based FWF research project “ZOZAN – Investigations on Mobility”, which is based at the Institute of Social Anthropology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

The exhibition is based on a participatory workshop organized at MARKK in June 2023. Existing, imagined and future archives were discussed and the following questions were raised: How do we, as immigrant residents of modern European cities, relate to images of our distant and near past? How do we navigate in a (now or someday) foreign country? And what kind of knowledge repertoires do we draw on?

Two multimedia collections by Werner Finke and Mehmet Emir, depicting Kurdish everyday cultures and traditional cattle breeding, together with ethnographic artifacts from the MARKK collection, formed the basis for a workshop with selected participants under the direction of the artist Savaş Boyraz and the cultural scientist and mediator Duygu Örs. This exhibition will rearrange themes and materials of this encounter in a construction that follows the Kurdish Zozan tents [Kurdish: summer pasture] into the present. In a playful yet critical interaction with the given museum space, visitors are invited to engage with the politics of representation and subjectivity in an archival context.

Tip:
Sun January 7, 2024 | 4 pm: Finissage