Fatemeh Rezaei

Work from Archive Of Traces: Stitching as A Counter-Archival Practice.

“Archive of Traces is an interdisciplinary research project that examines how institutional archives and the politics of language shape the visibility of Hazara histories in Afghanistan. This project focuses on how archival systems produce historical knowledge through practices of naming, classification, and omission, and on how these same systems leave some histories unseen or only partially legible within official records. I am especially interested in how displacement is translated into institutional categories that often fail to hold the complexity of lived experience.

As a member of the community that I research, I use artistic practice to respond to what appears absent from history. Working with archival photographs, documents, and installation, I approach studio practice as a method of research rather than as a separate form of expression. This project understands the archive not as a neutral repository of truth, but as a site where power shapes what can be recognized, recorded, and preserved. In this way, Archive of Traces engages fragments of history through material and affective forms in order to reimagine memory and attend to what remains only partially visible, without claiming a complete restoration of the past.

My perspective is shaped by growing up within Iranian and Afghan contexts, where questions of gender, visibility, and belonging were never abstract to me but part of everyday life. Patriarchy strongly influenced women’s access to education, work, and mobility, and class and social position shaped how those restrictions were experienced. Although I come from a working-class family, I was encouraged to study, travel, and imagine a different future, which shaped how I understand both exclusion and possibility. That experience also informs how I approach colonial photographs of Hazaras. I became especially attentive to how Hazara people, and particularly women, appear only briefly and partially within institutional archives. This absence has felt deeply personal to me. The more I searched, the more I realized how little there was. The images in this project are drawn from colonial archives spanning 1880 to 1956, yet the visual record remains limited and fragmented. In my work, I mark this fragile presence with a red triangle, a form connected to Hazara visual culture and the mountainous landscape of central Afghanistan, as a way of linking what appears faintly in the archive to a broader cultural memory that exceeds the limits of the colonial record. In this way, the project becomes not only a response to archival absence but also an effort to hold space for histories and presences that have not been fully recognized.

Questioning the reasons for my parents’ migration to Iran from Afghanistan led me to study more closely the longer history of Hazara displacement and to ask when, how, and under what political conditions this violence began. Although Afghanistan was not formally colonized by Britain, British imperial intervention was central to the formation of the modern Afghan state in the late nineteenth century. After the Second Anglo-Afghan War, Britain recognized and supported Amir Abdur Rahman Khan (the ruler of Afghanistan from 1880 to 1901) with subsidies, weapons, and political backing as part of its buffer-state strategy. It was under Abdur Rahman Khan, who ordered and oversaw the genocidal campaigns against Hazara communities, that anti-Hazara violence intensified in the 1890s through mass killings, enslavement, land confiscation, forced displacement, and the destruction of local autonomy, especially during the campaigns of 1891–1893. Recent legal scholarship argues that these atrocities should be understood as genocide and shows that anti-Hazara violence did not end in the nineteenth century but established a longer structure of persecution whose effects continue into the present. In this sense, British colonial power in Afghanistan operated not through direct rule, but through imperial support for a state whose consolidation was inseparable from the genocide and long-term marginalization of Hazara people.

Archive of Traces is not only a study of archival absence but a practice of reimagining how memory can be carried, materialized, and made felt. I treat the archive as a site where my artistic and feminist choices do not simply try to bring back the past but stay with the forces that have made some lives visible and others invisible over time. This means I do not see my practice as fixing the record or finding one final truth. Instead, I enter the archive knowing it is made by people, marked by gaps and silences, and still full of possibilities for reading and telling these histories differently.’ – Fatemeh Rezaei

Public Lands Institute

Work from their archive.

“The Public Lands Institute is an ongoing photographic index of American public lands, made by one person, in black and white, with no planned endpoint. It currently holds 91 sites in 20 states and 746 photographs, gathered under nearly forty managing agencies: national parks, national forests, wildlife refuges, state parks, county reservoirs, nature preserves, game areas. Yellowstone and a state park in eastern Iowa are entered on the same footing and photographed the same way. The pictures are indexical and anti-spectacular, made in whatever light the day offers, with no waiting for weather or hour and no interest in the view the parking lot was built to face.

Underneath each site sits a written record: geological formation, Indigenous territorial history and cession record, biodiversity observed on the ground, the mechanism by which the land became public, and a shadow history of what the interpretive signage leaves out. Research comes only from primary sources, including EPA cleanup databases, Park Service administrative histories, National Archives records, Chronicling America, court records, and treaty texts. Travel writing and agency press releases are not used. Where a site has no suppressed history, the record says so plainly and moves on.

Everything is dedicated to the public domain under CC0. Full-resolution TIFFs go to Wikimedia Commons and raw files stay in the project archive, free to download, alter, print, or republish without permission, payment, or attribution. Nothing is for sale, nothing is licensed, and images from the index have already made their way into Wikipedia entries for the places they document.” – Public Lands Institute

Aubrey Theobald

Work from Touch, Spring / Berührung, Frühling.

“Spring appears to us percolating in waiting as an accumulation of subtle variations – shifts in green light, delicate flirtations, a moment of warmth on your cheek – unfolding in partial fragments, both fleeting and constructed.”

It seems that a similar uninhibited, raw beauty delicately captures the large-scale, accumulative sculptural installation created by Aubrey Theobald in Berlin. However, in the case of her exhibition TOUCH, SPRING / BERUHRUNG, FRUHLING, the felicitation of light that spring begets carries a shade of pale yellow, a found object, a scent of chamomile, and melancholic ruminations on the cello.

Presented in the midst of the harsh Berlin winter in January, TOUCH, SPRING, reaches for warmth in its surroundings. Through locational specificity and ritual, Theobald creates an architecture of feeling where infrastructure supports delicate wisps of meaning between the anguish and romance found in a season of waiting. Delicate, Berlin-specific interventions of rule govern our navigation through found (zum Verschenken) materials and deteriorating, hyper-sentimentalized fragments of the artist’s romanticized daily life. Theobald takes on a season of ritual where the immediate environment becomes a mirror to our intrapersonal life.

Connection and collaboration serve as one of many coping mechanisms of the artist. The exhibition features a sound score, Kiss, Kiss, with Martin Edigi and Wojtek Prażuch, both of whom were invited to respond to Theobald’s emotive score on spring. Their responses, unbeknownst to one another, later melded as an intrapersonal conversation, positioning viewers in an intimate dialogue between strangers. Through the bureaucratic unit of a Baumschutzkorb and the image of a rose (both found, captured, and collected on significant days), Theobald and Jesse Ly negotiate how to lean on and support whom we love from a distance while grief, loss, and loneliness outweigh physical proximity.

Despite this abundance of objects with seemingly unclear origins and purposes, we do not feel as if we have entered some kind of Wunderkammer (Cabinet of Curiosities). The feeling is one of wholeness, homogeneity, gentle power, and some inexplicable childish melancholy. Everything leads us to delicate interventions of personal ritual, not dissimilar to the functions of soft bureaucracy allowing us to take away a bouquet of weeds on our way home.?

Cloying, pensive, and over-sentimentalized, Touch, Spring holds onto the fragments that slip our grasp and awaits our seasonal return to warmth.” – Boris Kostadinov and Aubrey Theobald

‘Zadie Smith describes the “splashy spring” in North London as having a “shade of green for every possible felicitation of light,” emphasizing its unplanned,
raw beauty.

*Handstraußregelung legislates the threshold between public and private aesthetics, a rule (a very small, controlled gesture) that allows us to take home one
bouquet of weeds every day, gauged by the size of “a palm.”

Vera Lutter

Work from Fragments of Time Past at Gagosian, Athens.

“Gagosian is pleased to announce Fragments of Time Past, an exhibition of new work by Vera Lutter featuring photographs of Attica’s ancient architecture, together with her images of the Greek temples of Paestum, Italy, and of classical statues housed in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. This is Lutter’s first solo exhibition in Athens in more than fifteen years. In response to an editorial commission – her first – from the New York Times Magazine, Lutter visited the Acropolis and Plato’s Academy in Athens, and the Temple of Poseidon in Cape Sounio in August 2021, braving the extreme heat and wildfires that threatened Greece that summer. Given the lengthy exposure times of her photographs, individuals passing through the sites have left no visible traces in the images, while the blurring of windswept trees contrasts with the unchanging solidity of the architecture.” – Gagosian

Ian Wallace

Work from Ian Wallace at Hauser & Wirth, London.

“A poet of images, Ian Wallace explores the interplay between form and content, using photography as a vehicle for developing an avant-garde art that weds the strategies of conceptualism with the pictorial tropes of painting. In doing so since the late ’60s, he became the pioneer of a photoconceptualism that fundamentally influenced and reconfigured contemporary art practice in Vancouver, not least through his teaching such artists as Jeff Wall, Rodney Graham, Ken Lum and Stan Douglas. Wallace’s art encourages a sophisticated involvement from the viewer. His works awaken the allegorical, symbolic potential of everyday subject matter, investing ostensibly non-eventful scenes with meaning. For his first exhibition at Hauser & Wirth – which coincides with a presentation of his work in three concurrent chapters at the Kunstverein fur die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Dusseldorf, Witte de With, Rotterdam, and Kunsthalle Zurich – Wallace is showing four new, interrelated works. ‘The photographic aspect is bringing meaning and representation of the everyday into focus; the monochrome is almost like the antipode of photographic meaning – its about historical positioning,’ Wallace has explained. This joining together of figuration and abstraction creates a delicate conjunction of incompatibles whose reconciliations might take place in the viewer’s mind. In this way the artist’s pensive, reverberating art calls attention beyond its apparent subject matter to the act of looking itself.” – Hauser & Wirth

Idris Khan

Work from Overture at Sean Kelly, New York.

“Overture will present over 25 new works exploring philosophical and theoretical ideas surrounding global displacement and conflict, demonstrating Khan’s profound interrogation into language and meaning over a wide array of media. Khan has developed a unique narrative drawing on diverse cultural sources including art, literature, philosophy and music. His densely layered imagery inhabits the space between abstraction and figuration that speaks to themes of history, cumulative experience and the metaphysical collapse of time into single moments.

In this new body of work, Khan overlays thousands of lines of writing until all of the words meld into a single image, obscuring any one viewpoint and eliminating a definitive reading of the text. Whether it is on large gesso panels, in a photograph or onto glass, Khan’s multilayered approach creates a sense of expanded time, allowing the viewer to contemplate a deeper meaning buried within language. Through a continuous process of creating and erasing, adding new layers, whilst retaining traces of what has been, Khan creates something entirely new by way of superimposition and repetition. Two highlights of the exhibition will be a monumental sculpture comprised of seven panes of glass suspended in an aluminum framework – each pane containing words, which form an abstract radial constellation – and a large-scale site-specific wall drawing that Khan will be creating at the gallery.” – Sean Kelly

Ken Gonzales-Day

Work from Erased Lynchings.

“The Erased Lynching series is an artist project that was intended to draw attention to the historic absence of Latinx, Asian, Native American victims from the history of lynching in California and has since extended to instances across the nation as a way address the erasure of African American and other histories from institutions of learning across the nation.

The series began with my own research into the history of lynching and culminated with the publication of Lynching in the West: 1850-1935 in 2006. The book and the accompanying art projects emerged in the shadow of James Allen’s Without Sanctuary (2000), and was produced in solidarity with the many scholars working on the history of lynching at that time. Clearly, no artwork can address the horror of lynching in the United States, nor the lasting trauma of lynching on African-Americans and their families. In this context, my project sought to bring attention to the impact of lynching on Latinx communities in California, as well as in our national history.

The erasure was a symbolic gesture, a digital alteration, and a conceptual act. It reflected my artistic decision to not represent the lethal results of racial violence. That is, I wanted to do a project on lynching but I didn’t want to show the victim’s tortured body but instead, to make visible, that the perpetrators in such collective, often premeditated, acts of killing, were (most often) white, organized, and clearly emboldened by their collective presence and shared willingness to reject the democratic principles underlying our judicial system. The only method I could imagine for communicating this idea was to create a body of work that would allow the viewer to focus their attention, not on the victim, but on the crowd itself. The resulting images invited the viewer to consider the setting, the lighting, and the crowd. Some of whom might have been photographed laughing, jeering, and in groups that contained women and children.

I had to imagine a new kind of photographic space, one which drew on conceptual art history but that could also carve out a new space where Latinx histories might also be acknowledged in an art world that rarely included Latinx or Chicanx artists or histories. The conceptual gesture of “erasure” provided a visual solution to something that I saw as a cultural problem, one that had been ignored, and/or created by those historians who had come before me, and therefore required the reframing of this history, though a very different lens. In this project, it would be the artwork which would invite change in a way that historical texts had not. It also required a very different way of thinking about artistic practices and consciously included: research, writing, and a wide range of traditional studio based practices.

As an artist who works with photography, I also had to contend with issues associated with photographic violence as it had been imagined and described by a wide range of critical historians of photography as represented in the works by authors like Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Rosalind Krauss, Alan Sekula, Maurice Berger, Shawn Michelle Smith, and so many others, all of whom encouraged a critical engagement with the photographic image. The project was about racial formation, intersectionality, queerness, and bodies marked by difference, at a time when anti-immigration rhetoric was contributing to deaths and other injustices along the U.S./Mexican border.

Begun in 2002 and first exhibited in 2005, the Erased Lynching Series may be my most recognized work and I believe it has helped to increase the awareness of the history of lynching in California. My research expanded the number of known cases of lynching in the state of California from 50 to over 350 though years of research in archives, pouring over countless rolls of microfilm, and historic accounts. The text also addresses the broader history of lynching in the United States, which, with the help of many scholars, now acknowledges the lynching of over 4400 African Americans (EJI), Asians, Native Americans, and now, for the first time, over 500 Latinx cases in the American West and nationwide. This new research shows that Latinos make up approximately 10% of all lynching cases in the nation.

Formally, I digitally removed the body of the lynching victim and the rope from historic lynching postcards in my collection and other archives. These images are then reproduced at or near original size, as a kind of assisted readymade to stand in for the original. By erasing the victim’s bodies, I sought to create a visual experience that would invite the viewer to see this intentional “absence” in two ways. One as a way resist the revictimization of those killed, and the second to draw attention to the crowd and the social conditions which made such acts possible in the first place. Looking at the crowd, the lighting, the details which remain, one begins to glimpse the underlying mechanisms of racism and bias that were essential to these acts of collective violence, which have increasingly come to be seen as central to our understanding race, racial formation, racial terror, and other forms of violence in America, linked in part, to what the poet Claudia Rankine has termed as the “racial imaginary”.

My project was created in solidarity with, a range of new scholarship that was emerging on lynching in the early 2000s. In addition to this series, “Lynching in the West: 1850-1935” (A John Hope Franklin Center Book) published by Duke University Press drew attention to a region of the nation that was not historically associated with lynching, and also remains one of the the few texts to acknowledge the full extent of lynching in California and across the west.

The series began as a response to anti-immigration/ anti-Latinx rhetoric that led to an increase in violence and vigilante activity against Latinx communities and immigrants arriving along the U.S./Mexico border in the early 2000s. Since then, the series has continued to grow as images were uncovered, and now includes images from across North America, including Mexico, to show the impact of lynching on many BIPOC communities and has expanded our understanding of Lynching in U.S. within a post-colonial context as well. The series now includes over sixty images from across the U.S., Mexico, and beyond. ” – Ken Gonzales-Day

Shannon Ebner

Work from A Public Character at Sadie Coles HQ.

“A PUBLIC CHARACTER is a newly commissioned work for ICA Miami, where Ebner’s solo exhibition of the same title is on view until 17 January. It centres on text culled by Ebner following research into Hudson Yard’s real estate project – a rezoning of 28 acres of the West Side of Manhattan that will result in a transformed public landscape, rewriting the public character of the neighbourhood and its citizens. Edited by Erika Vogt and scored by Alex Waterman, A PUBLIC CHARACTER progresses in the manner of an extended sentence – accelerating, slowing, or looping erratically yet rhythmically. Photographs of the various ‘As’ – magnified and implanted like adverts in urban settings – reel past at disarming speed, with Ebner periodically pausing on a view or message. Phases of silence meanwhile alternate with a soundtrack of urban noise – voices, vehicles and sporadic bits of found music create a sonic landscape that maps the topography of the city.

Interspersed with the photographs are sequences of text whose elements combine into a chain of indefinite propositions and abstract concepts: Ebner flashes up various statements prefaced by ‘A’, which range in character from public pronouncements to corporate slogans (“A PUBLIC SECTOR”, “A PUBLIC INFRASTRUCTURE”, “A TIME”). Elsewhere, they seem to reference her own project more closely (“A PUBLIC CONVERSATION”, “A PUBLIC DISCLOSURE”). Ebner returns throughout the film to images of the Hudson Yards development project in Manhattan; and this sprawling construction site evolves into a metaphor for the transitional and unstable nature of language itself. Images of the building works are interleaved with references to verbal tenses (“PRESENT CONTINUOUS”, “FUTURE CONTINUOUS, “WILL AND BE GOING TO”) that enhance the film’s underlying sense of endless flux and redevelopment.” – Sadie Coles HQ

Tega Brain

Work from Coin-Operated Wetland.

“Can a system of water infrastructure be a love story? What does design for mutualism rather than extraction look like?

Coin-Operated Wetland invites the wetland into a domestic relationship with a laundry. And in doing so, it blurs distinctions between upstream and downstream, human and environment. By directly connecting human action with environmental health, the work poses questions around ecology, co-existence and the expectations of engineering. Can our infrastructures be redesigned to support ecosystems as well as human communities?

Yes, it could be beautiful — but will it be?” – Tega Brain

Basim Magdy

Work from Someone Tried to Lock Up Time.

“In the new series Someone Tried to Lock Up Time, Basim Magdy combines recognized objects of history with a poetic mysticism that invokes both alienation and a feeling of familiar complicity. The text acts like a measure of time, be it a philosophical exploration of duration and how to capture it or a seemingly random correlation of past events. The images carry out the same action of free association: a Fayyum portrait that dates back to Roman Egypt, a cyborg bird and an ocean surfer are all parts of the same narrative. Interested in time and processes of selective historicization, Basim Magdy asks what will be made of us when we are looked at from the future and what artefacts remain to tell our stories?” – Gypsum Gallery