Selection of Works

Berlin Belgrade Tehran Tbilisi
Center for Peripheries is a collective operating at the intersection of social research and space-based art. It was founded by three artists who stem from Europe’s different peripheries (the Middle East, the Caucasus, the Balkans), but reside and collaborate in Berlin—one of Europe’s most significant centers, and the EU’s (statistically) most populous city—which has throughout recent history embodied the dialectic of East and West. Aiming to explore the relations of power and the mechanisms of othering within and beyond the far ends of this dialectic, Center for Peripheries operates through interventions themed around different notions of everyday life, expanding them into analyses of wider political contexts.
CURRENT & UPCOMING
MAY 13 – JUN 28 • Positions on Freedom, Museum Angewandte Kunst Frankfurt
MAY 20 – AUG 20 • Ljubljana Art Weekend, Ravnikar Gallery
MAY 22 – SEP 7 • Roots of Resilience, Spruce Street Harbor Park, Philadelphia, Pa.


Exhibitions

2024/25 Pillar of Societies (solo exhibition), Neue Galerie, Innsbruck

2024 Essen (group exhibition), Gruppe Motto Gallery, Hamburg
2024 Public Viewing (group exhibition), Loop/B-Part Raum, Berlin
2024 Nowhere Fast (group exhibition), Culterim, Berlin

2023 The Other Side of Water (curatorial), Kunstquartier Bethanien, Berlin

2022 Mit ein bisschen Glück ... groß gewinnen! (group exhibition), Galerie Saalbau, Berlin
2022 Des Nachbars Garten (solo exhibition), Galerie Retramp, Berlin
2022 The Other Side of Water (curatorial), Podroom Gallery, Cultural Center of Belgrade

2021 Alles muss raus (solo exhibition), Open Tiny Art Space Berlin, Germany Publications

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Press
Interview with Komplex Kulturmagazin, 2024    Read
Tiroler Tageszeitung, 2024    Read
Büro für gegenwartskunst, 2024    Read
Exhibitions
Pillar of SocietiesNeue Galerie, Innsbruck, Austria
Nov 2024 – Feb 2025

Taking a stroll in many a metropolis in the Global West, you might end up in a neighborhood nicknamed Chinatown or Koreatown; Little Italy, Little India, or Little Iraq; Balkan-Mile; or Tehrangeles.
These so-called ‘ethnic enclaves,’ spaces where networks of migrant communities most obviously come to life, are bustling with differences, contradictions, and dichotomies: arguably the most emblematic of them being that of visibility and integration.
The installations in this exhibition use store signs as a format and Monobloc chairs as a material to delve into this dichotomy by looking at the urban landscapes of cities in the Global West and exploring the gestures that minority groups make toward taking up space. There are two sides to every sign, and no (Mono)bloc is solid.https://www.kuveti.at/exhibition/stuetze-der-gesellschaften/

 
EssenGruppe Motto, Hamburg, Germany
Jun 2024

Des Nachbars Garten explores neighborly relations at different scales: fleeting moments of solidarity, micro, conflicts, transnational movements, pan-continental strifes. While some are optimistic or idealistic, others are confusing, contentious, nostalgic; and then there are the outright absurd. The exhibition brings forward these stories in the most ubiquitous of ways—using everyday supermarket products. Thinking of ways to pass these stories on, we looked at histories—botanical, etymological, political—of different foodstuffs present here. They are packed neatly onto shelves not unlike those found in stores across this country, and this part of the world, each referring to a more or less clearly defined geographical area, along with the most rudimentary imaginations thereof.  
As they stand here like a non-exhaustive collection of some (contemporary) historian obsessed with packaging design, they also crack open the perpetually intertwining global relations in all their gore and glory.
Public ViewingLoop Raum, Berlin, Germany
Jun – Jul 2024


Some forms of oppression are more surprising than others. Ever since the world's attention has been focused on Israel-Palestine in October of last year, German state institutions have been ingrained in different forms of suppressing freedom-to express opinions, to protest, to inform. These forms have ranged from brutal, to absolutely racist, to outright absurd. We have seen police beatings, Palestinian dissidents and activists threatened with legal action and Jewish voices subdued.

In late April 2024, the area around the Brandenburger Tor was proclaimed a keffiyeh-free zone. In a nearby part of town, members of the police were recorded preventing a group of people from speaking or singing in Irish—an official language of the E.U.—in light of the illegal and undemocratic ban of all languages other than English and German in public events.
https://loop-raum.de/Public-Viewing-E
Nowhere FastCulterim, Berlin, Germany
Nov 2024
Departing from airport signage and its ubiquitously casual usage of the word other, Left Lane Must Turn Left features such a sign on a transporting cart, skewing the established preconceptions of who the “others” are. 
The work speculates a passport control booth, equally likely being taken down or put up, where the countries of the Non-Aligned Movement have “right of way.” The Movement, which has since its conception in 1961 morphed from its founding principles, has always featured a most diverse collection of countries — this list, in 2021 arguably as arbitrary as any grouping of states, brings the oft-forgotten Movement into the spotlight, while as well underscoring the hierarchization of freedom of movement.The work series Walk Don’t Run manifests from stories of struggle, resistance and triumph in relation to outward movement: exiting, emigrating, escaping. The nearly internationally adopted emergency exit sign here becomes a symbol of our shared realities; its main character, a mere stick figure barely resembling a human, indicates to us how we should behave in the face of danger. How can we universalize it? What is standard about the impossible choice of fleeing one’s home(land) in the face of danger or uncertainty?
The Other Side of Water (curatorial)KQ Bethanien, Berlin, Germany 
& Cultural Center of Belgrade, Serbia
Aug – Sep 2023
& Apr – May 2022


The Other Side of Water is a curated group exhibition project centered on the politics and poetics of water. It connects Belgrade, Berlin, and Tehran, and presents water as a lens for thinking about migration, inequality, environmental damage, trade, colonization, mythology, and conflict, featuring works by more than 20 artists.https://theothersideofwater.com
Mit ein bisschen Glück … groß gewinnen!Galerie im Saalbau, Berlin, Germany
Nov 2022 – Jan 2023
Work in the back by Saša Tatić

A good immigrant always speaks in German, no matter how broken; a bad immigrant only uses another language. A good immigrant submits their documents in the order they were listed; a bad immigrant misses one paper. A good immigrant has a job; a bad immigrant steals jobs. A good immigrant is grateful; a bad immigrant criticizes.
Observing immigration, integration, and naturalization not as legal processes or bureaucratic phenomena, but as equivocal notions, the group exhibition Mit ein bisschen Glück… groß gewinnen! pokes at the tensions inherent to any multicultural society, including Germany.https://galerie-im-saalbau.de/en/exhibitions/mit-ein-bisschen-glueck-gross-gewinnen
Des Nachbars GartenRetramp Gallery, Berlin, Germany
Oct 2022
Des Nachbars Garten explores neighborly relations at different scales: fleeting moments of solidarity, micro, conflicts, transnational movements, pan-continental strifes. While some are optimistic or idealistic, others are confusing, contentious, nostalgic; and then there are the outright absurd. The exhibition brings forward these stories in the most ubiquitous of ways—using everyday supermarket products. Thinking of ways to pass these stories on, we looked at histories—botanical, etymological, political—of different foodstuffs present here. They are packed neatly onto shelves not unlike those found in stores across this country, and this part of the world, each referring to a more or less clearly defined geographical area, along with the most rudimentary imaginations thereof.  
As they stand like a non-exhaustive collection of some (contemporary) historian obsessed with packaging design, they also crack open the perpetually intertwining global relations in all their gore and glory.
Alles muss raus!Kunstraum Open Tiny, Berlin, Germany
Nov 2021
Alles muss raus, above all, considers the contemporary state of internationalism by exploring the influences and the deceptiveness of signs we encounter in the spaces of everyday life. Applying the Brechtian technique of Umfunktionierung through appropriating and re-contextualizing a selection of such signs, the exhibition underscores their hegemony while challenging their jurisdiction. We call upon the viewers’ sense of familiarity with the imagery we use, and the spaces we invoke, to deliver our message. Throughout this exhibition, we are reversing the established orders of authority. The exhibition is formatted as a spatial and aesthetic transformation of the Kiezkiosk Open Tiny into a signmaker’s store, in which different displayed signs tell a story of a world whose everyday is shaped by socio-political correlations divergent from those we are familiar with.
The authority behind the curtain, controlling the perception, is but the sum of the stereotypes and the bigotry we feared.
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