Artists

Alexa Karolinski/Ingo Niermann for the Army of Love, Sofia Karim, Maryam Tafakouri

Press release

I lately find myself returning to the time I spent in Iran in my mid twenties. I never spoke publicly about it, I felt there was no reason to. However, those months are crucial both in my life and in my development. I never experienced such a brutal disparity between the media image of a place and the place itself. I never experienced such a desire to share what I was experiencing and learning from the people, from a culture. There I got to experience poetry for the first time as the language of resistance. Poetry is fundamental in every culture, but the knowledge people possessed about their poets was so powerful and unique that it touched me deeply. The one poet that specially captured my heart was Forugh Farrokhzad. „My whole being is a dark verse“ or „All my being is a dark verse“—depending on the translation—is the first line of her poem Another Birth. Another Birth (Tavallodī Dīgar, تولدی دیگر) was published in the spring of 1964 and consists of thirty-five poems written over six years previous to the publication. The book emerged at a moment of profound cultural transformation in Iran. During the early 1960s, the country was undergoing rapid modernization under the Shah, while simultaneously experiencing deep political, social, and religious tensions. Another Birth  fundamentally altered Farrokhzad perception as a poet, until then she had often been discussed primarily as a "woman poet“, after she has been discuss as a writer. Darkness for Farrokhzad signifies neither despair nor negation alone. Darkness is a condition that signifies an unrealized potential—a space from which another form of perception, language, and life can emerge. She profoundly believed in the possibility of a rebirth of consciousness through poetic imagination. That is the reason, why I decided, in the context of an edition of „curated by“ dedicated to love to reflect on darkness. Darkness as the feeling that we should continue loving but also continue thinking, continue reflecting and interpreting times that demand a sense of the historical dimensions in which our cultural and artistic practices are occurring. For this reason, I have chosen to show two films at the core of the exhibition: Oceano de amor (2019) by Alexa Karolinksi & Ingo Niermann and Nazarbazi (2021) by Maryam Tafakouri. In the same space as these two films the audience will encounter a series of works initiated by Sofia Karim: Tippex Letter (Diptych) by Timothy James Young and Sofia Karim and Letters of light to Stacey Dyer, in prison in california, by Sofia Karim. Works in the main room: Oceano de Amor: Set in Havana, the film follows a diverse group of participants who discuss love, loneliness, work, desire, aging, disability, and care. Together they speculate about a society in which the redistribution of sensual and emotional care becomes a collective responsibility rather than a private privilege. The film asks whether love itself might be understood as a form of social infrastructure. The participants envision a future in which the only indispensable human labour is the giving and receiving of love. The Cuban setting should be seen as fundamental in this context. Ingo Niermann has explained that he— together with Alexa Karolinski— have chosen Cuba because it remains one of the few countries still formally organized around socialist ideals, making it an important context for imagining forms of redistribution that extend beyond economics. Nazarbazi (2021) by Maryam Tafakory—nazarbazi meaning "the play of glances"—is an essay film on love, desire, and the politics of looking in Iranian cinema, where representations of physical intimacy between women and men have long been prohibited. Drawing from post-revolutionary films, Tafakory assembles a montage of images in which women's bodies are simultaneously present and erased, exposing the mechanisms through which censorship regulates visibility, touch, and affect. Rather than representing intimacy directly, the film attends to the subtle gestures, glances, pauses, and absences through which desire finds expression within and against the limits imposed by censorship. Poetry and silence become the film's primary languages, allowing it to inhabit the spaces that cannot be touched or spoken: the interior landscapes of longing, the experience of untouchability beyond the body, and the unwritten prohibitions that shape emotional and social life. In doing so, Nazarbazi transforms censorship itself into an aesthetic material, revealing how restriction can produce new forms of visual and emotional communication. The letters. Hail Mary, 2025 (Diptych) (2025), by Timothy James Young and Sofia Karim. Timothy James Young is a writer and artist currently incarcerated on California's death row, where he has developed an extensive artistic and literary practice. Sofia Karimis an artist, architect, and human rights activist who has worked in sustained creative collaboration with Young, enabling the production, realization, and public dissemination of the works beyond the prison walls. Letters of Light by Sofia Karim (2026) The three letters are dedicated and made for Stacey Daniella Dyer, an incarcerated survivor of severe childhood sexual abuse, rape, and domestic violence who has spent more than two decades in prison in California under a sentence of life without the possibility of parole.