Exhibition Opening ~ If Not Here, Then Where? In the Friction of Shared Struggle

APRiCot Garden 2026:

If Not Here, Then Where? In the Friction of Shared Struggle

Exhibition involving more than 20 DAI Alumni (2009–2024):

Afrang Nordlöf Malekian, Alaa Abu Asad, Alexandra Martens Serrano, Baha Görkem Yalim, Derek MF di Fabio (with Dalia Maini), Duruo Wang, Foundland Collective (Lauren Alexander & Ghalia Elsrakbi), Giulia Crispiani & Golrokh Nafisi, Hasan Özgur Top, Ioli Kavakou, Leon Filter & Ian Clewe, Livio Casanova & Clara Saito, marce norbert hörler & Kari Leigh Rosenfeld, Mercedes Azpilicueta, Rana Hamadeh, Sepideh Behrouzian.

With spatial dramaturgy by Elisa Giuliano the exhibition features an array of film screenings, textile works, a mural, performance props, and an archival installation in the library of BAK basecamp. The works were assembled by Gabriëlle Schleijpen in a process of ongoing or reinvigorated conversations. 

Special gratitude goes out to Alexandra Martens Serrano for invaluable support to the spatial dramaturgy.

Opening October 3

On show at BAK basecamp till October 17, 2026. 

The exhibition can be visited during APRiCot Garden 2026: If Not Here, Then Where? Making Our Home in Shared Struggle and after that, during BAK basecamp's opening hours.

Please scroll to find all works and information on the artists below, but note that the photographs of installed works were taken at earlier occasions. The outlook of these works in the current exhibition may slightly deviate from how they appear in this online catalogue. A ground plan of the installation at BAK basecamp will be made available. 

 

ONLINE CATALOGUE 

Sepideh Behrouzian, Contact 

Print on backlit paper, 220×150cm, 2024.

In Contact, Sepideh Behrouzian brings archival photographs from Iran’s oil industry and geological surveys into a freestanding print on backlit paper. On one surface, landscapes, machinery and workers run in narrow vertical bands, recalling a contact sheet or survey log. On the other, geological strata share the frame with an oil derrick and human figures. Light passes through the paper, while the angled structure prevents the installation from settling into a single view.

The installation begins with a question about what images do within extraction: how they measure and divide land, and teach us to see it. Behrouzian did not want the archive to produce another continuous history of Iranian oil. I kept the fragments close enough to act on one another. Their contact brings surveying, labour and industrial ambition together while leaving the distances between them visible.

About Sepideh Behrouzian 

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Rana Hamadeh, Can You Make a Pet of Him Like a Bird or Put Him on a Leash for Your Girls? 

Two woven pieces (left) 120×180cm, (right) 120×60cm, wooden construction and pole 345cm, 2015-2026.

Can You Make a Pet of Him Like a Bird or Put Him on a Leash for Your Girls? is partially presented here through two woven elements. It is revisited in solidarity with those resisting the Israeli death machine in southern Lebanon by every means available to them, and with those forcibly displaced from their homes, who also face antagonism and abandonment from large sections of Lebanese society. This new reframing takes the form of a proposition: It does not not yet claim the status of a work in its own right, but rather a “poster” for a question still being formulated.

Originally comprising several woven elements, archival objects and a libretto, the work was developed as an extension of Can You Pull in an Actor with a Fishhook or Tie Down His Tongue with a Rope? (2014). That piece was an eight-channel sound composition and performance structured through the oratorical and theatrical traditions of Ashura, the annual Shi’ite commemoration in which mourners re-witness Imam Hussein’s martyrdom through narration, lament and re-enactment (ta’ziyeh). At the time of their conception, both works took the ceremony’s political, military and legal expressions within the context of the 2011 Syrian uprising and ensuing war as their field of commentary and research. They questioned the liberatory possibility of constituting oneself as a testimonial subject outside the court of law, and probed the contradiction through which an inherited refusal of oppression could become enlisted in the reproduction of domination.

The present revisiting returns to the work’s earlier interest in the testimonial from within a different political constellation, and from within the recursive operations through which testimonial subjecthood is produced: Hussein’s martyrdom constitutes an originary testimony to justice, repeatedly re-witnessed and transmitted, while subsequent acts of witnessing themselves become sites of political subjectivation, at times through martyrdom, to be witnessed and testified to in turn. The “testimonial” is brought forward once again to reconsider the relations between event, recursivity and political operativity under conditions of a genocidal continuum. Among other questions, Hamadeh is interested in the temporality of the testimonial when genocide is not only evental, but also fractal, scalar and recursive; when the genocidal field is sustained through duration, continuability and an adaptive capacity to reproduce itself.

This proposition is conjugated through Hamadeh's The Destiny Project, a later operatic body of work concerned with derivation, proxy, measure, error, parthenogenesis, self-similarity, fractal reproduction and recursive systems.

The larger weaving serves as a visual index to the original libretto, its legend and diagrams mapping the ceremonial and theatrical space; the second presents the emblem of Imam Ali’s sword. Alongside them, a libretto drawn from The Destiny Project allows one work to pass through another.

About Rana Hamadeh

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Mercedes Azpilicueta, Renascence (The Rebellious Garden) 

Tapestry, 55×32cm, commissioned by the Arcadia triennial Paradys, 2022.

Renascence constitutes one precious detail of Azpilicueta's monumental Jacquard tapestry featuring an imaginary garden: fruits and weeds, labour and leisure, chatelaines and knotted cloths, baroque and cosmic connections, field workers, literaries, poets, rebels and royals grow together anarchically at Mercedes Azpilicueta’s De Rebelse Lusthof, a garden that may or may not have existed to tell its own story. Luscious and unruly, the garden draws inspiration from a disappeared one, in Oranjewoud, Friesland, whose original baroque designs have been forever lost. Some names and faces were remembered well, such as nobledames Albertine Agnes of Nassau and Maria Louise van Hessen-Kassel, Frisian writers Nienke van Hichtum and Hylkje Goïnga, and playwright Anna van der Horst. Others on the contrary, were remembered less, such as—one of the few surviving stories—of domestic worker Ina (Jennikjen) Bakker—whose life was taken because of her class and gender. Azpilicueta tore their histories from their rigid chronology and universalised narratives and interwove them together again allowing kaleidoscopic connections growing like weeds in the Jacquard collage.

The nameless figure, possibly a gardener, seems to be floating in an ocean of pouring rain, taking shelter from the storm in a roughly woven piece of textile, a dark mantle that becomes a temporary home under harsh conditions. 

About Mercedes Azpilicueta

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Kari Leigh Rosenfeld and marce norbert hörler, Fitness! Commodity! Delight!

Film, 2026. Performers: Kameron Locke, Hannah Mehler, martín m. wollmann.
All further c
redits.

“Fitness,” “commodity,” and “delight” is a misreading of a translation of firmitas, utilitas, and venustas, the three pillars of architecture as stated by Marcus Vitruvius Polio in his first century BC treatise De Architectura. The film was conceived from marce norbert hörler's performance reading a room as a body (2025) at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen and its analysis of the conservative teleology contained in European architecture. Fitness! Commodity! Delight! first considers the museum itself within this analysis as well as the specifics of St. Gallen’s place in the history of architecture. 

The film follows and reinterprets both the performance in the brutalist architecture of Kunstmuseum St. Gallen's lower floor, the former home of the Natural History Museum, as well as the architectural layers of the city itself. It was the 15th century rediscovery of the only known copy of De Architectura in the Abbey Library of St. Gallen that is often cited as the beginning of the neoclassical movement. The Kunstmuseum, with its neoclassical upper floor and exterior, enters a narrative connection with the Abbey Library, where the Vitruvius volume is held.

Some scenes were filmed with an off axis tilt-shift lens, the lens used in architectural photography to create the illusion of perfectly parallel lines, bending the focus of the image against its traditional use; instead of creating more parallel lines the off axis tilt shift creates an uncanny off kilter image. The lens is its own reading—bringing together various registers of texture in the recording as well as camera movement calibrated to the performers.

The three performers have a spectral presence in the film: from channeling and interpreting the architecture, they appear to inhabit it. This reading is grounded in the conditions of the shoot itself. The effect of the architectural lens combines with the emptiness of the space and the absence of an audience. This ghostly quality is mirrored sonically, when the energetic diagetic sound of the film’s opening scene returns as the inspiration to the track accompanying the final scenes of the performance, before the camera weaves in footage of the ants that used to be housed within the same brutalist lower level of the Kunstmuseum. Is it the other way tho? by Miiel de la Mora and Kari Leigh Rosenfeld undergoes its own transformation alongside the film, shapeshifting from a dance track to polyrhythmic cumbia leading out of the museum as the film concludes.

About Kari Leigh Rosenfeld

About marce norbert hörler

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Ian Clewe and Leon Filter, The Spectres We Bring

Library installation, printed matter, single channel video, 18', 2022-2026.

The Spectres We Bring unfolds through a sequence of readings of the Communist Manifesto, first taking shape in Brussels around the Biographie des Suspects, a police register that led Leon and Ian to surveillance records surrounding Karl and Jenny Marx and the production of the Manifesto. From there, their reading expanded to the social and material conditions around the text’s development and into the city itself, tracing people, addresses, and vanished sites. At times this became a psychogeographical and even bodily reading; at others, they were drawn into the archive’s own logic of suspicion, where scattered fragments accumulated into possible connections. Reading with and against this logic, they stayed with what resisted a single account, as the search for the Manifesto gradually opened onto the wider infrastructures that made the text and its circulation possible.

Years later, in Bilbao, they were still haunted by the Manifesto and by what its circulation had set in motion. In Bibliografía de Espectros, they shifted their reading from production toward transmission, and from suspicion toward haunting. Reading the Manifesto through queer histories and publishing practices brought communist and queer struggles for liberation into contact. A series of photographic still lifes (Spectres at the Feast) and a video work (And That’s Love Too) became forms of “reading with the camera,” bringing other histories, bodies, and desires into the frame.

During If Not Here, Then Where? Making Our Home in Shared Struggle in Utrecht, the sequence turns toward reading and writing itself as practices of continuation and repair. Here, a newly written preface opens onto a publication and reading room, where their research and previous works are brought together across a series of pamphlets, posters, and other printed forms, opening the circulation to new readers and to the spectres they may bring with them.

About Leon Filter

About Ian Clewe

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Ioli Kavakou, Synaxári Synaxarium (Get Together)

Quilted taffeta, tin casts, stainless steel, 165×210cm, 2025.

Synaxári Synaxarium (Get Together) is titled after the Greek Byzantine word ΣΥΝΑΞΑΡΙ. It signifies the gathering of Christians for prayer, while also connoting the lives of Orthodox saints and martyrs. Composed of iconography collected from Medieval Bestiaries and Books of Hours, the embroideries bring together 81 different medieval representations of the monstrous, inquiring into the way they have transmuted into their contemporary forms. This serves as a subtle reminder that premodern questions concerning Otherness continue to haunt the Western world. The quilt is completed by a charm resembling a celestial constellation, produced by cooling molten metal in water—a process still used in molybdomancy rituals today to exorcise the Nazar, or evil eye. Bridging the apotropaic with the monstrous, the quilt poses a metaphorical question regarding the evils we seek to exorcise and the demons we seek to summon, highlighting the role of fiction in constructing deviance.

About Ioli Kavakou

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Hasan Özgür Top, First Revolt: The Black Cave (The Disappearance of Professor Mehmet Yılmaz)

Film, 39', 2025. With (among others) Vita Buyvid, Mandus Ridefelt, Francisco Mojica, Giorgos Gripeos, and Clara Amaral.

First Revolt: The Black Cave is the story of the earliest known uprising in human history and of Professor Mehmet Yılmaz, who uncovered the cave art depicting this revolt. The mockumentary film features interviews with Professor Yılmaz, his mother Meltem, and fellow researchers, discussing the cultural and historical significance of the discovery. It also touches on uprisings that have occurred in Anatolia over the past several thousand years. The film explores the staggering impact that the discovery of the cave art has had on the Western-centered perspective of civilization and the progressive view of history, as well as the current role of Western state institutions and the blurry boundary between speculation and scientific knowledge.

About Hasan Özgur Top

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Golrokh Nafisi and Giulia Crispiani, Under the Weeping Moon 

Acrylic on cotton, 400×450cm, 2026.

The large banner Under the Weeping Moon was conceived specifically to serve as a backdrop for APRiCot Garden 2026 ~ If Not Here, Then Where? Making Our Home in Shared Struggle at BAK basecamp, in Utrecht. Inspired by the framework of the symposium, the large black fabric recalls the drapes used in mourning ceremonies, and contains slogans, poems, and songs accompanied and contained by Nafisi’s illustrations. The main monstrous figure embodies the loss and the strength within the horizon of our collective struggle, in the dimmest of times. 

About Giulia Crispiani

About Golrokh Nafisi

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Foundland Collective (Lauren Alexander and Ghalia Elsrakbi), Stateless Struggle ~ From the Keffiyah Dreams series

Print on cotton, 100×100cm, 2014. 

Keffiyah Dreams (2014) is a series of scarf designs that takes the traditional Palestinian keffiyeh as its starting point. The square-shaped woven scarf was originally worn as practical protection from sun, wind and dust, and later became strongly associated with Palestinian identity and resistance. In this series, Foundland remixes the familiar keffiyeh pattern with icons associated with struggle, leadership, displacement and visions of paradise, creating alternative narratives appropriating the scarf’s pattern. Positioned between fashion, cultural memory and political statement, the series explores how a simple pattern can carry stories of movement, loss, resistance and hope. When Stateless Struggle was made in 2014, the scarf referred to the mass exodus of Syrians forced into exile by the war in Syria. Since 2023, the keffiyah has become highly visible again in relation to the genocide in Gaza, appearing widely in protests, political imagery and public space. Within this continuing context Keffiyah Dreams gained renewed meaning as gesture of solidarity within on-going conditions of injustice, statelessness and displacement.

About Foundland Collective (Lauren Alexander & Ghalia Elsrakbi)

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Duruo Wang, A gift, a piece of dyed cloth that many women beat until it becomes shiny, stiff and waterproof

Dyed and beaten cotton (made by Yi Shan Ren 倚山人), single-channel video with sound, printed text, 2026.

“I have been thinking of sending a gift for Gabriëlle’s retirement as director from the Dutch Art Institute, something like a conclusion that carries a continuation of what she has been building. And this type of cloth comes to mind. It is made through repeated dyeing, rinsing, beating, steaming and drying until it becomes shiny, stiff and waterproof. In the rural regions where Guizhou, Hunan and Guangxi meet, folks maintain the tradition of making it for clothing, although its everyday use declines. It becomes useless unless or until it can be reframed as a piece of art, a form of intangible heritage, a model of social resilience imbued with premodern romance, or a kind of ecological wisdom that might save the ‘World’ from a future climate catastrophe. Yet, in these ethnic minority regions that supply the majority of the labour for the World’s Factory today, is the infrastructure called ‘tradition’ an incidental leftover from the past, or a hard-won base that has sustained social reproduction under precarious conditions? Why do folks move back and forth, sending the proceeds of alienated labour home to persist for an ‘autonomous’ life whose activities exist in their uselessness? 

Something with me from DAI, sometimes on its way to roam with what these regions bring to me. Something resonates, something not only about the intensive collective labour required to bring it into being and sustain it, and the conviviality and exhaustion of moving with it and being moved by it, but also its stubborn stance and uncertain relationship with capitalist social relations. And without further ado, without imposing a promise of value or a positive significance, perhaps let’s take a moment simply to pass on a gift that can still be carried as a gift, a circulation of Marina Vishmidt’s message: ‘One more time if you would be useless.’”

About Duruo Wang

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Derek MF Di Fabio, BARK (a decomposing society that praises the hardness while exploiting the softness)

Curtain, cotton, polyester, mixed media, 2020.
The curtain on display features a sentence contributed by Dalia Maini.

BARK (a decomposing society that praises the hardness while exploiting the softness) begins from a contradiction: a social order that celebrates hardness, autonomy, and self-sufficiency while depending upon bodies, forms of labour, and systems of care whose softness it continuously exploits.

Developed by Derek MF Di Fabio since 2020 through workshops, rehearsals, and collective actions, BARK considers fear not as a private condition to be overcome, but as something socially produced and meticulously maintained—so deeply embedded in everyday life that it can come to appear as the world itself.

Against this apparent solidity, BARK turns to porosity. What is allowed to remain vulnerable, what is compelled to harden, and whose exposure sustains the protection of others? The curtain emerged from this collective process. Both screen and permeable boundary, it neither fully separates nor protects. Stitched onto its surface is a sentence written by Dalia Maini during one of the first BARK workshops—a fragment of a collective process that asks what might become possible once hardness is no longer mistaken for strength.

About Derek MF Di Fabio

About Dalia Maini

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Derek MF Di Fabio, Headpieces, performance props 

The 4 exhibited Headpieces will come alive on October 3, 2026 during the performance A sip 2 gaze 3 leaps.

Headpiece 1: corn leaves and linen, 2026. Headpiece 2: false papyrus, ivy, hop, red osier dogwood, weeping willow, 2026. Headpiece 3: contorted willow, weeping willow, red osier dogwood, and other plants, 2026. Headpiece 4: weeping willow, graphite, 2025. 

The Headpieces find their collaborative origin in a series of workshops and in the performance I weave spells on the solstice, spectre of an exorcised dragon, that took place in San Sebastián in 2025. Starting from traditional basket weaving techniques encountered across the Mediterranean and the Basque Country, and then diverging from them, these pieces are made to be carried by the body, enhancing its absence. The body of work exhibited  and in use at BAK basecamp, is adorned by flickering electric lights instead of the initial burning candles. 

About Derek MF Di Fabio

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Clara Saito and Livio Casanova, Crossing The Dunes aka Gossip

Movie, 30', 2021.

“Crossing The Dunes aka Gossip frames the symbolic principles that govern our lived reality as myths: the myth of Switzerland, the myth of nation, the myth of categorisable identity; echoing Barthes diagnostic of the ideological utility of mythologies. Yet, instead of simply critiquing the ideological myth, the filmmakers propositionally present ‘gossip’ as an alternative method of interpretation, perception, and storytelling. If myth is ideological, then gossip is social. Gossip is a verbal practice of social bonding, an informal mode of information sharing associated with women and marginalised communities which leaves room for interpretation and adaption. Gossip makes no declarations of universal truths. It’s about time gossip was reclaimed from the demonised connotations bestowed upon it by the myth-making institutes. Through both form and content, the film presents ‘gossip’ as a method for navigating these mythologies in a way that reinstates the complex agency of the ‘self’ within them. By privileging a form of ‘storytelling from below’ Crossing the Dunes aka Gossip adeptly tethers the intimate to the political, the theoretical to practice, and the symbolic to the embodied, whilst providing abundant conceptual space for their generative entanglements.”—Bethany Crawford.

About Livio Casanova

About Clara Saito

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Livio Casanova, Gossip

Scarf, 2 meter, wool, embroidered with the word "GOSSIP", 2021

“… How did this light talk amongst female friends become a sort of ridiculed practice with malicious intent? Mystery and morality plays of the pre-modern English society, were written by the guilds. Men who formed the guilds were expected to satirise those to be condemned in order to boost their power locally, and they were particularly wary of strong, independent women who seemed to prefer time with their friends than their husbands. The idea then becomes that gossips are disagreeable, aggressive and argumentative. In Witch-Hunt, Hannah Black writes, ‘Gossip has always been a secret language of friendship and resistance between women.’ The essay takes Federici’s research and argument to discuss the entanglements of capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy throughout history through the lens of gossip. How do we reclaim gossip then?”
—Polly Wright, Excerpt from the essay Talking of Gossip (2021).  

About Livio Casanova

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Baha Görkem Yalım, Remembrance’s Stench

Single channel colour video without sound, 35' in loop, 2021.

“This silent video-piece finds its origin in the poem Remembrance’s Stench. The artist wrote it for their grandfather who was assassinated for political reasons. Görkem transformed/translated their intimate text, a poetic montage of their early memories, into a hand choreography.

(...) loss is being crystallised on the video’s immobile background in front of which we see the artist’s hand dancing the poetry. This is a damaged version of The Threatened Swan (Dutch: De bedreigde zwaan), an oil painting of a mute swan made around 1650 by Jan Asselijn, a Dutch Golden Age painter with a withered hand. The painting’s subject, a life-size swan, is defending its nest against a dog that is not painted in life-size and only visible at the far-left corner of the painting with its small head, which creates a visual imbalance between the sizes of the aggressor and the retaliator and accentuates the defensive rage of the latter.

The swan, with its trans-human capacity, as in Swan Lake, in which Odette is a princess at night and a swan during the day, with its sexualization in many depictions in the 15th and 16th centuries, when it was considered more acceptable to depict a woman in the act of copulation with a swan than with a human. With their fame as one of many bird species that form same-sex partnerships, swans are already queer animals. Görkem, by cutting out the subject of the threatened swan, wilfully censors the queer image, but, by taking the dog also out of the picture, they cancel out the fight, attack, and threat altogether; they leave us with the serenity of a colourful sky but also the trace of the violence that still dominates the screen with a threatening blank.”
—From curator Alper Turan's text for A Finger for an Eye (Göze Parmak), a 2021 exhibition in Istanbul that responded to the ongoing violence materialised in the realm of the visual codes, symbols, and representations of queer existences in Turkey.

About Baha Görkem Yalim

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Alexandra Martens Serrano, Between Two Twilights and Charged with Eternity

Etchings on mirror, 90×60×6cm, 2023.

Between Two Twilights and Charged with Eternity grasps at the Night as a realm of boundless virtuality. The work uses obscurity as a dimension of unresolved potential, transgressing the immediately visible. Using a specific hand made etching technique, the drawings on the plate become holographic images that hover and move across the surface in a response to a play between light and the movement of the viewer.

About Alexandra Martens Serrano

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Alaa Abu Asad, COME WITH ME TO FRANCE 

HD single channel video, 12'49'', 2025.

In this video work, Alaa Abu Asad re-edits a pornographic film he found online in 2012. When he first watched it, he noticed how the Arab body was portrayed by a white French filmmaker and his Western gaze. He realised that the film exposes an image industry shaped by colonial histories and sustained by the persistence of white male power. Images of lust appear tinted by domination, fantasy, and exoticism. Abu Asad was reminded of the orientalist theories he once studied and decided to interlace them into a new edit of the same film. Yet he does not present them as mere critique.

As the film unfolds, it turns toward something more tender. A softer voice searches for warmth and belonging, for something beyond injustice and othering. It finds light between image transitions, in the dazzling sun reflecting on white stones. The voice, both visual and spoken, carries a sense of home. It lingers in garments swaying in the souk, in narrow alleys and steep stairs, in waves breaking against the shore, in the scent of jasmine behind a window, in the faces of passersby.

The voice does not turn away from desire. It looks at the sculpted bodies of men, their glowing skin, the moments where attraction glides over muscle and sweat, as if reclaiming what history never allowed to surface. Through these gestures of montage, the work restores a place and a pleasure once seized and stolen.
—Rawad Baaklini for
Sun, Don’t Rush to be Red. Son, Don’t Rush to be Read, TENT, Rotterdam.

About Alaa Abu Asad

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Afrang Nordlöf Malekian, Leo’s Tail, Eyebrowed Sun

Mural, 260×170, 2025–2026.

The lion-and-sun emblem is attributed to several different origin stories. One of these traces the motif to the astrological zodiac system, where it represents the sun in the house of Leo. Historically, this has been depicted in manuscript illustrations, ceramic objects, and tilework on buildings in Central Asia in the form of a sun beside a lion. By drawing on this visual world, the mural explores what happens when animals or celestial bodies are given a human face.

About Afrang Nordlöf Malekian

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Afrang Nordlöf Malekian, A Lion’s Tail

Sculpture, mixed-media, various dimensions, 2025.

In the sculptural work A Lion’s Tail, Afrang Nordlöf Malekian plays with the various characteristics projected onto the lion. Rather than focusing on its associations with strength, hardness, and power, he turns to the tail as an object of concealed queer identity. Constructed from decorative materials traditionally associated with wealth and high status, the tails embrace a deliberately kitschy aesthetic while also suggesting something wearable: objects that anyone might put on and, in doing so, momentarily inhabit a different self.  What might first appear as an adornment or disguise is thus simultaneously rendered as prey, suspending A Lion’s Tail between decoration, transformation, and capture.

About Afrang Nordlöf Malekian