Washing the Eyes: Silent Witnesses

Programme

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  Eyes Skinned (Mona Hatoum, GB/CA 1988, 4’)

  The video shows a person in a black hood, sometimes overlaid with images of torture and violence, using a sharp knife to scratch at their own eyes. In the background, we hear snippets of news reports about the eradication of the Palestinian people.

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  My Own 1000 Square Metres (Atousa Bandeh Ghiasabadi, NL/IR 2006, 13’)

  After seventeen years in the Netherlands, an Iranian woman returns to her homeland with a dream: to own a small piece of land, a place she envisions transforming into a green oasis in the arid desert. Together with her parents, she searches among dust and rocks for possibilities, while collecting hopeful cactus cuttings in her father’s garden.

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  To Keep the Mountain at Bay (Gelare Khoshgozaran, US/DE 2023, 10’)

  A poetic reckoning with displacement, memory, and resistance, where the mountain becomes both exile and witness. Drawing from personal and collective histories, Khoshgozaran explores the enduring trauma of forced movement and the emotional geographies that remain long after borders are crossed.

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  Between Relating and Use (Nazlı Dinçel, AR/US 2018, 9’)

  Dinçel’s work interrogates how people are “used” as lovers, as objects, and as symbols. What does it mean to truly relate to one another in a world shaped by domination, trauma, and inherited histories? The body remembers what language cannot say.

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  There’s a Hole in the World Where You Used to Be (Mariam Ghani, US 2025, 15’)

  Blending archival footage, personal reflection, and dreamlike images, the film reflects on the absences left behind by war, displacement, and erasure. Ghani invites us to listen closely: to what remains unsaid, to the echoes within silence, and to the ghosts that linger in the present. What is gone never truly disappears.

• 

  Takbir (Aziz Hazara, AF 2022, 10’)

  Kabul’s past and present connect through the echo of a chant once used to protest Soviet occupation and revived during the U.S. withdrawal in 2021. Blending light and shadow, sound and silence, the film explores how collective resistance, sonic ritual, and the search for truth move through time and space in a city marked by conflict and resilience.

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  AS FOR THE QUESTION OF INSINCERITY, AN APPLAUSE FOR THOSE IN THE SEATS (Nazanin Noori, 2025) (LIVE)

  Noori approaches applause not as a neutral expression, but as a behavioural pattern that reinforces authority, suppresses critical thinking, and enables emotional synchronisation in service of power. The work predominantly reflects on the mechanics and dangers of consent. Drawing on field recordings from protests, concerts, political speeches, theatrical performances, and ritual chest beatings—particularly those from Shia Muharram ceremonies—she constructs a soundscape that includes synthesised applause, electronic textures, orchestral swells, and choral fragments.
  
  Nazanin Noori is a Berlin-based artist whose work weaves together sound, space, and emotion with an evocative and deeply atmospheric touch. Her practice moves fluidly across disciplines—encompassing sound art, composition, live and lecture performance, installation, directing, and text—forming a rich tapestry that reflects her unique vision. Her work invites us to feel, to pause, and to listen with our whole bodies. In each piece, she offers not only an experience, but a world.
  
  Her performances have been staged at Martin-Gropius-Bau, Villa Massimo, Berghain, Schirn Kunsthalle, Schauspielhaus Zürich, La Gaîté Lyrique, CTM Festival and ICA London. Her theatre works were staged at Maxim Gorki Theater, Deutsches Theater and Berliner Ensemble. Her sound scenarios have been presented in international radio stations, such as Mutant Radio, Deep House Tehran and Refuge Worldwide, where she holds a residency since 2021.​ Nazanin Noori was awarded with the Ars Viva Prize for Visual Arts (2026).