Third Text

1 May 2026

Zeynep Turan
 

In 2024, a group of Palestinian artists, in collaboration with the Forbidden Museum (Al Risan Art Museum) near Ramallah, initiated the Gaza Biennale in response to ongoing conditions of erasure, displacement, cultural silencing and genocide in Palestine. Conceived as a transnational initiative and remaining an ongoing project today, the Biennale has taken shape through solidarity-based pavilions hosted by international galleries and art institutions in sixteen cities to date. The Istanbul pavilion was presented at Depo Istanbul from 19 September to 8 November 2025. Hosted by House of Taswir, the exhibition featured works by more than fifty artists from Palestine, Gaza, and beyond. This interview and conversation with cultural theorist, writer, and curator of the Istanbul Pavilion, Almut Sh. Bruckstein, was initiated in September 2025, and continued at different times and in different contexts until January 2026. It focuses on the Istanbul pavilion of the Gaza Biennale and the broader questions it raises around exhibition-making, solidarity and cultural practice.
 

‘A Cloud in My Hand’, the Istanbul Pavilion of the Gaza Biennale initiative, 2025, installation view of the ‘Museum of Affinities and of Distant Collaborations’, with works by Alaà Al Shawa, Motaz Naim and Ana Sontag, photo by Yasin Tubail, courtesy of the artists and House of Taswir

Zeynep Turan:   Since 7 October 2023, Palestine has become a global concern. Many artists and cultural workers have been threatened or fired for their support of Palestine. Responses – particularly in Europe and the United States – have included boycotts, strikes, open letters and museum occupations. How do you evaluate the solidarity actions of art institutions and artists against the genocide?

Almut Sh. Bruckstein:   First of all, dear Zeynep, thank you for this invitation. We know that many European and Western cultural institutions are siding with fascism and are complicit in the genocide against the Palestinian people, against all the evidence of what happens live-streamed before our eyes. But there are many artists, scholars and colleagues who are standing up for justice and humaneness in the midst of this very oppressive environment. I admire the courage and the resilience of the activists who are taking to the streets expressing our protest loudly. Street activism is a very important thing today. The fact that 200,000 people march across London Bridge shows the world that there is a civil uprising against this kind of genocidal violence.

At House of Taswir, we are humbled to stand with the Gazan artists and the power of their artistic imagination, through which they continue to create art amidst a death machine that aims to indiscriminately kill and destroy. It seems that the defiant gesture of the artist creates a kind of post-liberation scene, as if to anticipate the beauty of Palestine, a free Palestine in the midst of a death field, through broken pens and brushes, resisting erasure.

ZT:   From your perspective, how did the idea of the Gaza Biennale emerge? What have Palestinian artists and the institutions involved in the biennale experienced?

AShB:   The Gaza Biennale, unlike other biennials, was initiated and commissioned by the artists themselves. In 2024, around fifty artists proclaimed this biennale on a beach under siege.

Declaration of the artists

We hereby announce from here, from the land of Gaza, the launch of the Gaza Biennale, with the participation of over 40 artists, to affirm that Palestinian art pierces through all besieged spaces. No war can stop the dreams of dreamers, and no mechanisms of domination extinguish the light in the hearts and minds of creators. On behalf of all the participating artists, including those who, due to war and geographical division, are unable to join us physically, we affirm the following:

1.   Through art, we resist all forms of genocide and oppression.

2.   We continue to give and create, despite all obstacles and challenges.

3.   Through art, we transcend barriers, ensuring that the voices of Palestinian artists reach the world, reaffirming Palestinians’ right to speak and be heard.

4.   The Biennale represents the starting point for collective artistic work, uniting many parties and institutions that believe in the justice of our cause and the power of art.

5.   The Biennale emerged despite dispersion, displacement and suffering endured by artists, gathering to fill a need – for invention, dignity and purpose, we present a vision for a better future.

This Biennale is a call to the world, to artists and cultural institutions, to stand in solidarity with Palestinian artists, support them, and work together to ensure that their voices and stories remain present, and that their works remain a testament to struggle and resilience, lighting a path for humanity in the most dire times.

The artists of the Gaza Biennale Initiative,
quoted from their website, May 2025  www.gazabiennale.org

This proclamation itself can be seen as an artwork, a first performative act of the Biennale. This declaration was exhibited in the Istanbul Pavilion as a mural writing, typed by a ghost-writing machine onto the exhibition walls, an artwork by the imaginary artist Ana Sontag: Apparatus of Scribes (2009–2025, and ongoing)

Since neither the Gazan artists nor their artworks can travel outside Gaza, this Gaza Biennale initiative instantly inverts the colonial background of the history of biennials. By invoking the term ‘biennale’ from a Gazan beach under siege, the artists are turning its nationalist principles on its head. We know that the foundation of the Venice Biennale in the year 1895 was closely related to the so-called world exhibitions, in which colonial powers presented exotic trophies from all over the world in the competitive spirit of national representations. The Venice Biennale, to this day, preserves the idea of the national pavilions as an architectural principle, and some of the best international curators have been working for years on the undoing of this territorial way of representation.

The Gazan artists in their proclamation of a Gaza Biennale initiative de facto counter-appropriated the concept of the biennale, thereby undoing the colonial structure of the biennale as an institution. In their oppressed state of physical arrest, the artists, by their defiant announcement, engender a desire among individual colleagues, curators and friends to become collaborators, instantaneously creating a diasporic dispersion of manifold ‘pavilions’ of this biennial in the world. How did that happen? The artists – in collaboration with the Forbidden Museum, Jabal Al Risan, in the hills of Palestine near Ramallah – published a call for applications. Very soon after, twelve venues – now sixteen – around the world expressed their desire to realise a pavilion of this biennale, each on their own account. To date, there have been pavilions in London, Edinburgh, Athens, Sarajevo, Capetown, Johannesburg, New York, Washington, Berlin, and more. And of course, there is the Istanbul Pavilion. This Pavilion does not begin with a national governmental institution, or art foundation, which commissions a curator, or a group of curators, who then ‘select’ the artists they would like to exhibit, but in turning this upside down, more than forty artists standing on a beach in Gaza in the midst of a genocide are themselves commissioning a biennale to be taken up by individual colleagues in various cities in the world. It is not a case of curators choosing artists, but we, colleagues in the art field, become collaborators in these artists’ cause. They chose us, not the other way around. And we love to be part of this inversion. The artists say, ‘We are the Gaza Biennale Initiative’, and we, the various venues, reply ‘Would you please allow us to provide a venue for your work’.   

Here in Istanbul, the Istanbul Pavilion of the Gaza Biennale initiative was given an overwhelmingly generous welcome. Not only by the venue, Depo Istanbul, but also by everyone involved, co-curators, artists, technical support, friends and family, individual private collectors, and more, as in the beginning there was no formal budget for this Biennale, or any state or institutional support until this very day.  

ZT:   How did the curatorial and organising team for the Istanbul pavilion come together?

AShB:   The entire Istanbul Pavilion, with its more than fifty works by Gazan and collaborating artists, developed from personal and co-incidental encounters that turned into unexpected collaborations. Our Istanbul Pavilion started in communication with the Addar Centre, a community for Palestinians and Syrians in Istanbul. Addar is a community of mainly Palestinian and Syrian associates, scholars, artists, diplomats, writers, publishers, friends and international partners, all held together by the presence of its Palestinian founder and guiding spirit, Mazen Rabia, who founded Addar about fifteen years ago with the support of various individual partners. Without Addar’s spirit of generosity, community and sharing of resources, the Istanbul Pavilion of the Gaza Biennale would not have come about. 

The Istanbul Pavilion was realised by a curatorial quartet, composed of the Beirut/Berlin filmmaker Reine Chahine, the Palestinian filmmaker Khaled Tanji, who is also a participating artist in the Istanbul Pavilion, and by Istanbul-based exhibition curator Kubilay Özmen, besides myself with the House of Taswir, an international platform for artistic research and diasporic thinking, that I founded in 2006 in Berlin. 

The main challenge in realising the Gaza Biennale in Istanbul was this: how do you present the works of fifty-five artists in their absence and given the absence of their work? We wanted to present their work in the most exquisite way possible, to give them a stage within the international art scene that they deserve as artists, an exhibition on a ‘museal level’, more than just simply reproducing their work in the context of solidarity alone. To present absent works in original, analogue ways borders on the impossible, and it was precisely this challenge that presented itself right at the beginning of our curatorial work. We solved this question by working with the artists through one-on-one personal conversations, mostly via WhatsApp, often interrupted by weak or ruptured internet connection in the Strip. Co-curator Reine Chahine spoke to the Gazan artists for many hours on a daily basis, conceiving new ways to produce their work, either in collaborations with Istanbul artists – as can be seen in the eight-metre-long mural by the Gazan artist Mohammad Alhaj that was realised by Istanbul artist Furkan Akhan – or in works whose material was transposed, such as when a maquette or sculpture becomes a photograph, as in the case of Yasmeen Al Daya or Mohammad Suliman. Sometimes we also played with the dimensions or proportions of the work; a tiny, feeble thing could become massive, and vice versa, as in the case of the sculpture - by Gazan artist Fares Ayash, which became a 140-centimetre marble sculpture, standing its ground for generations to come, produced together with the artist and in collaboration with a whole research team dedicated to making these works speak and address an Istanbul International Biennial audience.

‘A Cloud in My Hand’, the Istanbul Pavilion of the Gaza Biennale initiative, 2025, installation view with Mohammad Alhaj’s Abu Al-Kuffiyeh (2025), in-situ drawing by Furkan Akhan, photo by Yasin Tubail, courtesy of the artists and House of Taswir

ZT:   From this perspective, the Gaza Biennale isn’t just a way to show solidarity with Palestinian artists or with Palestine, it also shows that we can step outside traditional exhibition frameworks. In this respect, it also offers a different perspective on discussions within contemporary art, because, as I understand it, the Istanbul pavilion encompassed different exhibition practices: co-creation, ghost-writing, tele-conversations, and collaborative installations. Could you describe the conceptual background of the Istanbul pavilion and the different formats it engages with?

AShB:   There was a dynamic inside the Istanbul Pavilion; it was an exhibition that ideally wished to greet every single visitor with a different face. As the architect of this exhibition, I decided to treat every visitor as if she was visiting my home – throughout all the hours of the exhibition from beginning to end. I built a kind of salon into it, a greeting room, a room where you sit and talk when you enter. Since I thought that we would have to open the exhibition unfinished, or even ‘empty handed’, due to the lack of resources, it was decided to develop the exhibition together with our guests, or at least with those who were interested in it. There were different ways to collaborate with this exhibition as a guest: one way was to acquire a work from the so-called ‘Wall of Forty’. The Wall of Forty is a collective wall, on which at least one artwork of each artist was represented. We succeeded in creating an economy for the artists inside the exhibition, with all proceeds, except production costs, going to the artists. This is how it was framed:

An Economy of Friendship

The economy of the Istanbul Pavilion is based on coincidental and overflowing generosities. Its budget is sustained not by governments or foundations, but by the unexpected gifts of spontaneous personal encounters – the support of family and friends, colleagues and neighbours, by the generous donations of artist friends, and the open hands of friendly galleries and private collections.

From these gestures – intimate, personal and unpredictable – an autonomous network of support has emerged. Relationships of friendship and solidarity create an economy without masters: independent and resilient, carried by trust, affection and chance encounters. Solidarity itself becomes an abundant currency – mirroring the courage and resilience of the Gazan artists as much as we can and sustaining this exhibition through nothing less than friendship and admiration, even love.

This economy is open and emerging. Art lovers and friends are warmly invited to participate – by acquiring works, by helping us produce new ones (some walls are still waiting), or by taking home some of our posters or ‘tokens of faith’. In defiance of the agency of death that rules the lives of all Gazan residents today, the artists stand as witnesses, and their works cannot – and will not – be erased. Each contribution from visitors and friends directly supports the Biennale and its artists, opening a tiny window to the world, a small crack through which miraculous beginnings may appear.

Another special feature of the Istanbul Pavilion was its ghost-writing machine. This machine was devised by a spectral artist by the name of Ana Sontag (she loves to intervene with writing apparatuses in exhibitions of her choosing). Her apparatuses wrote poetry by absent artists on a vintage writing machine and onto the walls of the Pavilion as poetry murals. In our exhibition there were poems about death and texts by the Gazan artist Mahmoud AlBalawi and others, written onto the walls of the Pavilion. 

Then, throughout the entire first floor, we created a ‘Museum of Affinities and of Distant Collaborations’. We call it ‘affinities’ when artists from Gaza and their collaborators in Istanbul mirror one another in co-creative works, whereby all works were ‘smuggled’ via the interface of WhatsApp conversations with our team. I give you an example: the artist Mohammed Alhaj, who was living displaced in Gaza, keeps a notebook in which he sketches a heroic figure liberating Palestine in various ways, a kind of alter ego of the artist. The work is called Abu Al-Kuffiyeh. The figure is depicted as a beautiful, strong, heroic guy who does away with all means of oppression; he easily removes the Apartheid war as if it is nothing, liberating Palestine in strong moves, not militant but elegantly heroic.

ZT:   I noticed that the artists Furkan Akhan and Mohammed Alhaj worked together.

AShB:   They did. What I realised is that we need collaborations in the literal sense, co-creations. The Istanbul artist Furkan Akhan, in conversation with Mohammad Alhaj via the mediation of the Lebanese co-curator Reine Chahine, created a storyboard, taking all these small sketches by Muhammad Alhaj, and turning them into an eight-metre mural, putting six or seven sketches together into one story. How did we do it? Reine Chahine engaged in conversations with the artists on an almost daily basis; WhatsApp conversations that turned into intense collaborations, although since internet access in Gaza always proved whimsical, calls were often interrupted. These conversations were therefore truly precious, and in the case of Mohammad Alhaj culminated in a large mural storyboard that is truly mind-blowing. The ‘Museum of Affinities and of Distant Collaborations’ is an emerging museum showing ways how to show a work in collaboration with an artist under arrest, physically absent and under the threat of death. The works themselves changed during this process and turned into new works. They changed in material, size, proportion and media. A maquette, for example, could become a photo presented as a diasec print, or a photo could turn into a sketch, a sculpture into a print.  

In this exhibition, out of solidarity and genuine interest, international artists who in one way or another are associated with the work of House of Taswir, joined our cause. The first artist to join was Alfredo Jaar, the Chilean artist whose work The Rwanda Project honoured victims of the genocidal violence in Ruanda in 1994. He donated an iconic work to our exhibition, a neon-script print of a Seneca quotation saying ‘What Need Is There to Weep Over Parts of Life? The Whole of It Calls for Tears’ (2018). Other artists whose work we respect also joined and started to support the Istanbul Pavilion, such as Walid Raad, Taysir Batniji, Silvina Der Meguerditchian, Shirin Neshat, Michael Barenboim, and others. Some of their galleries, too, generously lent their support, lending works, paying for transport and insurance, etc. In this way, our Istanbul Pavilion was no longer just a Gazan affair, but became a vibrant, open exhibition featuring emerging Gazan artists intermingling with established international artists. The Istanbul Pavilion became this global exhibition with open margins, which quite paradoxically ‘smuggled’ its main positions out from an entirely imprisoned region via personal WhatsApp conversations, under the threat of a genocidal death machine. It may sound strange, but this Pavilion – as with many of the other pavilions of the Gaza Biennale initiative – has no limits now. It is really an exhibition that appeared on the scene miraculously and which we are convinced will persist in various forms, creating its own afterlife from within itself. We have already received an invitation from the 7th Mardin Biennale, also in Turkey, to present a small Gazan constellation from the Istanbul Pavilion – and this could go on and on, for many of the other pavilions as well.

ZT:   We have talked about Muhammed Alhaj and Furkan Akhan. Are there any other examples of collective production in the exhibition? Could you briefly tell us about the artists participating in the exhibition and their works?

AShB:   There is one work that became very important to us. It is the work of Khaled Tanji, the Palestinian/Syrian prize-winning filmmaker who also worked with us as co-curator of the exhibition. He insisted on speaking with every single artist from the Gazan artist collective in a personal interview of about one hour each, to do a video portrait with them about life, survival and everyday stuff in their current situation, in which the artists face genocide in so many dimensions. We built old-fashioned wooden phone booths to frame those WhatsApp conversations, people could see the person speaking from behind the glass of their mobile phones and listen in by picking up vintage receivers. Those conversations were presented together with a broken TV installation showing poetic and archival material on the history of Palestine, her poets and political leaders. This is a very important work that took up almost the entire upper floor of the exhibition. It is called Re-Connecting and was shown with works by Walid Raad and Taysir Batniji. It has been acquired by the prestigious Collection Servais in Brussels and will hopefully travel widely.  

‘A Cloud in My Hand’, the Istanbul Pavilion of the Gaza Biennale initiative, 2025, installation view with Khaled Tanji’s Re-Connecting (2025), photo by Yasin Tubail, courtesy of the artist and House of Taswir

Another Gazan artist who worked with us in amazing ways to transform a sculpture to make it reappear in our exhibition is Fares Ayash. Fares had created a small sculpture, a small statue from cement, meant to be a homage to the shoes, the clogs, that UNRWA distributed in Gaza to all Gazan residents, when UNRWA was still able to carry out its work. Since reasonable shoes became a rarity in Gaza, many people would wear them. But of course, those clogs, made from plastic, dissolved quickly. People’s toes would stick out; the shoes barely held their feet together. Sadly, many of those short-lived clogs outlived the lives of the people who wore them. Fares Ayash’s sculpture is a homage to these shoes. He calls it Dorgham, for lion or hero. The original work is very humble and interesting. It connects the shoes to the body of a female dancer with a magnificent Degas dancer’s skirt, signifying lightness and movement, being brutally cut short by a cement bloc imprisoning her upper body, cement that the artist often had to walk kilometres to get. When we asked him to create a sample for us, to photograph it from all sides, and to send it to us by phone for a 3D print for our exhibition, it took weeks to complete. A friend and collaborator, Gökhan Karakuş, an architect and researcher, together with a well-known workshop for producing marble sculptures, had the vision to create a 3D-printed, 140-centimetre marble version, turning it into a testimony forever. Quite an unbelievable act of generosity and graciousness that was typical for this Istanbul Pavilion of the Gaza Biennale, as if to take on the impossible task of balancing out the abyss of brutality, death and the evil of the occupation in Gaza, and all of Palestine, by stunning collective acts of artistic transformation.


‘A Cloud in My Hand’, the Istanbul Pavilion of the Gaza Biennale initiative, 2025, installation view with a sculpture by Gazan artist Fares Ayash, and a work by Alfredo Jaar in the background, photo by Yasin Tubail, courtesy of the artists and House of Taswir

ZT:   In one of your social media posts, I saw a map stitched together by various people.

AShB:   You are referring to the work of Gazan/Palestinian artist, Hala Eid Alnaji, who currently lives in Malmö, Sweden. She is part of the Gaza Biennale initiative, and in addition to being a participating artist, she also curated the French Pavilion. Her work Nazeh’s Lexicon includes a detailed street map of Gaza. In a collective effort, mostly in Cairo, the artist invited people who fled or were displaced from their homes in Gaza to draw or stitch their personal lines of flight into this map. The map was shown in various places as a large floor installation. In our Pavilion, due to the restriction of space, it became a large textile map into which mainly women who met with the artist in Cairo stitched their various escape routes, or routes of displacement, in different coloured yarn into the map. The participants also marked the map visually by small, stitched images, visual symbols, often mysterious, items of personal memory. What is beautiful about this map is that it is not only an object in an exhibition, but is, rather, the crystallisation of a collective act, a community gathering, tracing lines of flight and displacement in shared moments of mutual support, grief and collective creativity.

‘A Cloud in My Hand’, the Istanbul Pavilion of the Gaza Biennale initiative, 2025, installation view with Hala Alnaji's map of Gaza, photo by Yasin Tubail, courtesy the artist and House of Taswir

ZT:   There are two concepts you focus on in your own texts and speeches: ‘epistemic architecture’ and ‘Talmudic way of thinking’. How did these two concepts inspire the exhibition sketches and spatial arrangements for the Istanbul Pavilion?

AShB:   House of Taswir has worked for years on what I call epistemic architectures. Epistemic architectures are a way of structuring knowledge, not in a linear way, but by a-linear, often poetic, or dreamlike association. This epistemic architecture is inspired by ancient texts. If you look at such a text, a Hadith or a folio of the Talmud, you will see a text with open margins, an open commentary, in which commentary flows in and out of the central text, to which it is always dedicated. The commentaries sometimes literally flow in and out between letters and words, and they are meant to be extended over generations. These ancient texts were never meant to be confined by national boundaries, their communities spread, rather, via madrasas and houses of learning that are much older than the European universities. Of course, these ancient texts, which do not suffer any territorial confinement, are hijacked today by colonialist, political national agendas. In my various exhibitions, I adopt this hijacked and therefore abandoned architecture and apply it structurally to many of my exhibitions. House of Taswir exhibitions are all built like ancient texts. I love these non-territorial ways of thinking. Freud’s work on dream texts is also indebted to them. Talmudic thinking, or dream-texts, allow faraway things to be touched; allows time to become non-linear, and co-incidences to rule.

Surely, if we talk about the Talmud, the central text of the rabbinic tradition, this ancient architecture is absolutely and fatally betrayed. And now, more than three years into an abysmally violent genocidal war on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, I am tired of defending Jewish traditions, the loving kindness, the love for justice, the visions of humanity it surely has, against its violent perversion. With huge respect for the current diasporic positions taken by courageous Jewish activists to disentangle the tradition from the violent grip of violence – groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace, and others – it seems to me that the entanglement between State violence and religious tradition is engrained not only by betrayal in action through injustice, occupation and genocidal war, but that it is sealed beyond repair by its very language: one would have to rescue Israel from itself, and that ceased to be of utmost importance to me. What I want to do instead is something quite simple: I want to stand at the side of those who muster the courage, the resilience, the vision, the humaneness to stand upright inside a relentless death machine whose only aim is to kill, and to defy it by making art. The artists of the Gaza Biennale initiative manage to create open margins in a caged-in territory by way of their art. They are inscribing themselves into an epistemic architecture of the open margin, into a diasporic way of thinking, in the midst of genocidal military confinement, and my institution, the House of Taswir, is grateful to play a part in this. Showing artworks by Gazan artists in Istanbul at the time of the 18th International Istanbul Biennal meant smuggling humaneness across sealed borders for all to see. Of course, unfortunately, every tradition that is full of virtues can be betrayed; Islamic or Christian traditions can be betrayed in the same way. But it is so evident today that the heart of humanity’s betrayal lies in the genocidal occupation of Palestine, in Gaza. There is no question about it; there is no ambiguity, nothing complicated. Humaneness, when it comes to Gaza, is excruciatingly absent, yes, but it is no longer complicated.

ZT:   The title of the exhibition is ‘A Cloud in My Hand’. Yasmeen Al Daya's work Life (2024) was used in the exhibition poster. How did you decide on the title and poster of the exhibition?

AShB:   Firstly, the poster: in the very beginning, in December 2024, the Forbidden Museum sent us many portfolios, one from each artist, with an abundance of works in each of them. They were unfinished portfolios, many of them. Looking through these portfolios felt a bit like dream-walking. It was not possible to really engage with every single work. Coincidence and desire play a role, and you are suddenly struck by something. When Reine Chahine and I saw Yasmeen Al Daya’s mask, we were so impressed. We saw clay sculpture, fragile and humble. An homage to an eight-year-old girl who takes her last breath. It is a death mask, yes; but what it shows is someone still breathing, still speaking, still singing. Someone’s testimony, someone’s last words. The artist herself titled this work Life. We felt honoured that the Istanbul art magazine ArtDog dedicated its cover of the September 2025 issue to this work, which meant some huge exposure during the 18th International Istanbul Biennial. Obviously, we couldn’t show the original mask in our Istanbul Pavilion. Rather than reproducing a similar mask, the artist, Reine and I decided to show a life-size photograph of the mask presented as a large diasec print, immediately opposite the entry to the exhibit. A spectral appearance the visitor must stand up to. This work demands us to literally stand up to it – to emulate, if you wish, the uprightness of the artist, standing tall and continuing to work even if embraced by death. The artist chose a deep black surrounding to the mask, although there are some sparkles on it, almost invoking an astrological scene. The sculpture was made of dirt when even clay was no longer available. To create a new work together with the artists, this was the idea. And it worked.

How did we come up with the title of the exhibition, ‘A Cloud in My Hand’? We owe this title to a personal coincidence; it is related to a comment by a dear friend on poetry. When the founder of Addar, Mazen Rabia, saw the white horse at the centre of Mohammed Alhaj’s mural Abu Al-Kuffiyeh, he mentioned Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry, saying ‘of course, this horse will make everyone think of Mahmoud Darwish’. He was referring to Darwish’s poems Why Did You Leave The Horse Alone, or The Horse Fell Off the Poem. The horse is a symbol of the longing for a liberated home, a liberated Palestine. I then took the collection Why Did You Leave he Horse Alone from the shelf of House of Taswir’s library, opened it at the first poem and read ‘A Cloud in My Hand’. There are many references to the cloud as a home between heaven and earth when life is hanging on a thread. It brings to mind the poetry of Paul Celan, who wrote poetry in German when the German language was irreparably broken into pieces after the Shoa, the German genocide of the Jews. The cloud refers to a state of being neither here nor there, in-between heaven and the earth. Despite its wide misuse in techno-commercial contexts, the cloud remains an evocative, poetic reference for something ephemeral, not here or there. This is why I chose it.

‘A Cloud in My Hand’, the Istanbul Pavilion of the Gaza Biennale initiative, 2025, installation view with Yasmeen Al Daya’s Life (2025), photo by Adam Bruckstein, courtesy of the artist and House of Taswir

ZT:   I don’t have any other questions. Do you have anything to add?

AShB:   Yes, maybe. Something quite personal. When I saw you, a very personal body memory came up. Seeing you accompanied by your husband, who is also working with you, I felt that I was not dressed properly. I remembered my time in Jerusalem, when I used to walk in traditional neighbourhoods and where you feel exposed when you do not keep to the boundaries of proper dress, exposing the décolleté, the elbow, the knee, the shoulder, etc. I felt that I was not dressed appropriately for this interview, as in the presence of your husband, my body memory signalled, I am behaving improperly, or with disrespect. And of course, when you saw me, you couldn’t have guessed this tiny moment of embarrassment, because how could you have known about my ‘traditional’ past as a woman once ‘veiled’, when I got rid of my pious attire so long ago.

You touched a hidden layer in my biography. Because in Istanbul, of course, people see me as a European intellectual, often also as a Jewish intellectual, and since my work is so decisively diasporic, and not nationalist, people usually sympathise with this version of a female Jewish diasporic intellectual. But nobody would associate me by external appearance with a veiled lady in the context of Al-Quds [Jerusalem]. I unveiled the veil in the mid-1990s in Jerusalem, because I felt that all (Jewish) traditionalism has been hijacked by the most violent and ideological occupation, for the sake of a fascist agenda that especially (but not only) in Palestine takes on murderous dimensions in the hands of the occupiers. But, of course, there remains a body memory. A feeling of sisterhood with certain ways of wearing the veil, with certain ways of seeing others from inside that veil. I remember the brilliant project of the sociologist Nilüfer Göle called ‘modern mahram’ here in Istanbul that I was loosely associated with. When I come face to face with a ‘hijabi’ in a collaborative work context, I always feel that something is being smuggled, something that can be quite powerful. A hidden adhesion that is provoked by so many tiny things, a posture, a glance, and a shared awareness of how the female body moves in public. This moment of adhesion goes beyond political geographies and national territories, and certainly beyond the East-West divide. It deeply connects Jewish and Muslim ways of dealing with femininity (often violent and patriarchal, but that is not the point here). In traditional contexts, no matter where, I sometimes feel I am wearing a double veil, since the absence of the veil then feels like covering up something. Veiling and unveiling of course indicate a dynamic which is deeply embedded in any psycho-phenomenological interaction, and it pertains to people, as well as objects, traditions and positions that may show you a face, a persona, which acts as a cover up for what is denied, hidden, displaced or disavowed. 

ZT:   Thank you for sharing such a personal feeling and memory of your own. Especially in Turkey, the discussion of the veil, even though it remains a neuralgic point of the relationship between tradition and politics, has been confined to rather shallow discussions. You unexpectedly opened my eyes to an experience I did not realise, because I did not think of the veil as an instrument of smuggling adhesion beyond geography and nation states. You have given me a breath of fresh air. I don’t know how we could have ended this interview in any better way. Thank you so much for your time and patience.

House of Taswir is an international platform for artistic research and diasporic thinking founded in 2006: www.taswir.org

Almut Shulamit Bruckstein is a writer and curator, and founder of House of Taswir

Zeynep Turan is a writer and researcher who works and lives in Istanbul