Artist
Raisan Hameed
Raisan Hameed (b. 1991) is an Iraq-born visual artist currently living in Leipzig. He received a Diploma in Fine Arts in 2022, and is currently pursuing an MA at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig. In his works, Hameed deals with different dimensions of truth. While he concentrates on making the inside visible, he simultaneously identifies with the outcome. He is often the subject of his images, processing his experiences metaphorically through acting and experimentation. Hameed's works have been exhibited in various exhibitions in Rotterdam, Berlin, Dresden, Bonn, Leipzig, Rome, Palermo and Sharjah.
Website: raisanhameed.com
Zer-Störung
Zer-Störung tells the story of different periods in Mosul – the city of the artist’s birth. The starting point for the project was photographic material from Hameed’s family archive as well as his own photographs taken in Mosul. As carriers of memories, these images have visible and invisible layers; an observation that is already expressed in the title. A play on words, the English translation of "Zerstörung" is "destruction", describing the brutal damage that man inflicts on the world, his environment and other people. "Störung", in turn, translates to "irritation" – a term that Hameed connects to the impermanence of things. The artist uses abstraction as a strategy to break down the original function of the images, changing the way in which they are read.
By focusing on the materiality of images in Zer-Störung, observations and their political contexts are transformed. They become a metaphorical documentation of past, present and future. The process allows for the opening of doors, negotiation, reflection and exchange.
In Monika Orpik's work titled Stepping Out Into This Almost Empty Road, we are invited to engage with migration and transience with her stark black-and-white photographs that document various states of impermanence along the Polish-Belarus border. The Białowieża National Forest is the center of Orpik’s meditation on life at a time of political oppression and transformation.
Peter Pflügler’s work Now is not the right time equally begins with a forest and a deep desire to use photography as a means to investigate and render previously hidden secrets visible. Strikingly coherent and honest in his approach, Pflügler’s work intimately instigates a conversation about suicide, secrecy, and the suddenness of time’s ongoing passing.
Raisan Hameed focuses on the materiality of images in his work, Zer-Störung which, as the name suggests, looks at the processes of destruction, and what remains are documents formed by various layers of time as open questions and scars. Starting with the combination of personal and archival imagery from his hometown Mosul, Hammed’s work engages with the photograph’s power to obscure time and meaning.
Bärbel Reinhardt’s work draws from photographic stratification. Working across various modes of presentation, Reinhardt’s work plays with the imaginary quality of the photograph, looking at the contemporary cut-and-paste visual queues as signposts for a recyclable iconography. In her project, again still erratics perhaps, the artist gathers, deconstructs, cuts, assembles, photographs, re-photographs, and repurposes these to create a dense visual space where different times and techniques collaborate.
In artist and author Marie Hervé’s work, history is both completed and open-ended – her tendency to work with a combination of archival and personal imagery anchors her narratives into past, present, and future. Her project The island on the island is a meditation on the Mediterranean territory’s beauty and transience. The act of researching and retracing the past, becomes a means through which to engage with the unstable nature of the present.