exhibition
SIXTH TONE
Fatih Aydoğdu, Thalia Hoffman, Karam Natour, Anahita Razmi
10/06 – 30/07/2022
curated by Darya Aloufy and Davood Madadpoor
as part of a collaboration with Sumac Space
Opening: Thursday, June 09, 2022, 6 pm
with an artist talk with all artists present
Venue: philomena+, Heinestraße 40, 1020 Vienna
Thalia Hoffman, Guava, 2014, video still, photography: Ran Moncas
Sixth Tone is an experiment seeking to work through dialogue and peer-to-peer exchange in the process of exhibition making.
During a series of group meetings, carried out over six months, four artists and two curators assembled to question identity, belonging and the concept of “home”. The artists, coming from various cultures and nationalities, reflected on their hybrid identities, characterised as a fluid form that internalises the negotiation and processing of different cultural perspectives. It implies that a person may feel equally belonging to two or more cultural spaces. These hybrid identities are considered inter-, trans- and multicultural; their bearers are bi-native, bi-national or tri-national; they either sit between the chairs, or on a third chair; at times, they don’t experience multiplicity but rather a contradiction, when the two cultures that form their identity do not coincide. The meetings offered a communal exercise in intimacy and vulnerability in a safe space devoted to debate, disagreement and listening.
At philomena+, the group will present individual works alongside glimpses from their dialogue through responses and reflections on each other’s artistic objects.
artists
(b. 1963) lives and works in Vienna and Istanbul. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul and graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Aydoğdu is a conceptual visual artist, designer, curator, writer, and sound artist, focusing on concepts of media aesthetics, migration & identity politics, and linguistic issues. He took part in numerous exhibitions throughout Europe, Asia, and the USA.
THALIA HOFFMAN
b. 1979) lives and works in Jaffa. She is a visual artist and researcher working in film, video, performance, and public interventions in the area she lives in, east of the Mediterranean. In 2020 she graduated from ACPA with, PhDArts, with the thesis “Guava, a conceptual platform for art-actions”. The aim of the Guava Platform is to research and create possible techniques of art-actions that are part of her quest to continue to live in a conflicted landscape, as an artist. Alongside her artistic actions, Hoffman is a lecturer at the University of Haifa in the fields of video, and performance.
KARAM NATOUR
b. 1992) lives and works in Tel Aviv. Natour’s practice employs a variety of mediums, including video, digital drawing, and installation, although he considers video his ‘mother tongue’. Through these, Natour reflects the fragmentation of identity—its characteristics, its fluidity, and how it is constructed by culture, gender, and nationality—through the use of humor, irony, and art history. Natour has received various awards including the 2020 Wolf Foundation’s Kiefer Prize for Young Artists. In 2020 Natour was chosen for Forbes’s 30under30 list.
ANAHITA RAZMI
b. 1981) lives and works in Berlin and London. Working with installation, moving image, and performance, her practice explores the possibilities of contextual shifts - with a focus on shifts between an 'East' and a 'West'. Her works were exhibited in international institutions like Museo Jumex, Mexico City, Halle 14, Leipzig, Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Kunstraum Innsbruck, Sazmanab Center for Contemporary Art, Tehran, Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, The National Art Center, Tokyo, and Kunstmuseum Stuttgart. Among other grants and scholarships, Razmi received a Kulturakademie Tarabya Fellowship (2021), the Goethe at LUX Residency, London (2018).
curators
is a curator and researcher. She holds a Master's Degree in History of Art from UCL, where she was the recipient of the Fer-Garb Scholarship. She is currently an Assistant Curator at TAU Gallery. Her research examines counter-narratives, equivocal identities, and under-researched histories, primarily focusing on the work of women artists in the Middle East. In 2020, she co-founded the Collective for Constant Questioning (CCQ), a platform that centers questioning as a methodology for a deconstructive agency and constituting alternatives. In 2021, she was selected to participate in the second edition of the Young Curators Academy at the Maxim Gorki Theater, Berlin. Since August 2020, she has been contributing to Sumac Space.
DAVOOD MADADPOOR
was born and raised in Tehran, where he worked as project manager at the Tehran Art Center (Hozeh Honari). His interest in the arts led him to move to Florence, where he obtained a BFA and an MA in Curatorial Studies from the Accademia di Belle Arti. Davood is also co-founder and curator of Sumac Space, a digital platform devoted to contemporary art practices in the Middle East through exhibitions, critical writing, and research. This aligns with his personal research interest in exploring different narrations, story-telling, and fictions that reconstruct the contemporaneous backdrop of a socio-political landscape in flux as a mixture of origin, transition, and an unknowable future. Since 2018, he has been working as project coordinator / curatorial assistant at Villa Romana.
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