Are you interested in working creatively with an expert in human rights and curator and a group of like-minded people on everyday Kurdish social memory and art in March?

We invite you to take part in the project ZOZAN – Investigations on Mobility and to participate in a workshop with Melis Kaya.

• Date: 7 to 9 March 2024, 7 and 8 March 13:00 – 19:00, 9 March 10:00 – 18:00
• Exhibition of the outcomes: June 2024
• Venue: Kurdish Institute of Paris, 106 Rue La Fayette, 75010 Paris

Participation requirements:

Interest in modern Kurdish history, visual anthropology, memory studies and storytelling.

The material will be provided by the project team and the curator.

Consent to the documentation and publication of the work process and results.

The workshop will be held in English.

We ask you to bring your “memory bag” (with photos, objects, fabric, items, …) on the second day.

Information and registration: workshop@fikp.org

Project link : https://www.oeaw.ac.at/en/isa/research/islamic-middle-east/zozan-investigations-on-mobility-through-multimedia-documentations-art-interventions-art-based-research-and-representations

ZOZAN is a Kurdish term meaning summer pasture. It refers to the traditional way of life of animal husbandry on alpine pastures, to a mobile life in relative freedom.

The art-based research project ZOZAN combines three thematic areas:

• Past and present mobilities
• Cultural heritage and art production
• Identities, forms of memory and representation in transnational spaces.

ZOZAN takes two comprehensive multimedia collections on Kurdish societies created between 1968 and 2019 as its starting point. The Werner Finke Collection and the Mehmet Emir Collection are located at the intersection of art and social anthropology and reflect traditional ways of life and socio-political transformations.

The ZOZAN team (Maria Six-Hohenbalken, Mehmet Emir, Eva Kolm, Eva Stockinger) is organising nine artistic interventions based on multimedia documentation by Finke and Emir.

Experienced artists are invited to engage with the collections and realise an artistic work. They will each lead a workshop with a group of invited participants. In this way, different audiences are included in the forms of presentation that encompass the collections as well as ZOZAN's current engagement with the themes.

The ZOZAN team will realise a detailed audiovisual documentation of the workshops and conduct various talks. The artworks and work processes will be presented to the international public in individual exhibitions in various exhibition spaces and finally as an overall show. In parallel, a multi-page brochure will be produced for each workshop, which will eventually be included in a catalogue.

Looking towards the ground from the perspective of the “statelessness” in the foreground, one witnesses only the path of “official” memory, pehaps even the obligation of “disremembering” the things. The aim of this workshop is to create a three-dimensional new memory space on Kurdish identity experience through archives on modern Kurdish history and personal memory.

Melis Kaya will encourage the participants to document or re-establish their collective or personal memories, which have been confiscated by official historiography or governing powers in a sense, on a simple white board, starting from the photographic collections of Werner Finke and Mehmet Emir and utilizing multimedia instruments, arts, literature, social sciences and written archives.

ZOZAN Workshop 8 will benefit from the Kurdish Institute’s multimedia archives and library which stands as the largest Kurdish library in Europe.

We aim to do a new reading of history and memory, focusing on the facts on which we construct our own identities, apart from what we are taught, imposed or even exposed to.

ZOZAN Workshop 8 is a cooperation between the Institute for Social Anthropology, AAS Vienna and the Kurdish Institute of Paris.