Chiara Cartuccia (DAI's 2024 - 2025 COOP tutor) has curated a group exhibition at La Fabra Centre d’Art Contemporani in Barcelona, entitled As Stones on Their Palms, Embers and Flame (after a poem by Palestinian author Fadwa Tuqan) and it features works by our alum Hasan Özgür Top (DAI 2018 - 2020) among others. The exhibition explores the entanglement of ruination with histories of anticolonial resistance, uprising, revolution, and political radicalism across the Mediterranean. Ruins are not understood here as inert remnants of the past, but as charged terrains where capitulation and endurance meet — “negative commons” that, while bearing the traces of decay and dispossession, also harbour the promise of resurgence, inscribing a field of struggle where memory, imagination, and desire intersect. They are inseparable from the gestures that produced them and from those that rise in their wake: acts of disobedience and steadfastness, carrying within them the dual fate of defeat and victory.
About Chiara Cartuccia
About Hasan Özgür Top
The other artists are : Marianne Fahmy, Joyce Joumaa and Huda Takriti.
As Stones on Their Palms, Embers and Flame
07.02.2026 - 31.05.2026
The exhibition brings together four artists whose work engages these conditions through distinct yet convergent strategies: addressing ruins as mnemonic sites and speculative devices, where remembrance sparks projections of futures beyond catastrophe; tracing cycles of social ruination in the light of revolutionary pasts and presents, exposing how collapse and germination fold into one another; interrogating archaeology and the archival as technologies of domination, disciplines that fabricate legitimacy, monumentalise defeat, and erase insurgent memory. Ruin is seized as a terrain of confrontation, where violence is neither concealed nor disavowed, but recognised as integral to the generative force of political transformation. The exhibition’s lexicon also unsettles the figure of the “hero,” shifting the viewer’s attention toward collective gestures of defiance, sacrifice, and repetition. Resistance is reframed not as a singular, continuous triumphal gesture, but as a recurring, obstinate rhythm — the persistence of bodies standing, falling, and rising again.
As Stones on Their Palms, Embers and Flame positions ruin as both wound and weapon, at once scar and arsenal. From this unstable ground, between dust and ignition, new solidarities and configurations of struggle erupt. In the interstices of destruction and creation, political imagination endures.