Center for Peripheries

Selection of Works

Berlin

Belgrade

Tehran

Tbilisi

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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
OCT 2 – OCT 31 • BUNA 4, Varna BG
NOV 4 – DEC 12 • Off the Precipice (curatorial), Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna AT

Exhibitions

2026 Roots of Resilience, Spruce Street Harbor Park, Philadelphia, Pa., US
2026 Around Every Circle Another Can Be Drawn, Ravnikar Gallery, Ljubljana, SI
2026 Positions on Freedom, Museum of Applied Art, Frankfurt am Main, DE

2024/25 Pillar of Societies (solo exhibition), Neue Galerie, Innsbruck, AT
2024 Essen (group exhibition), Gruppe Motto Gallery, Hamburg, DE
2024 Public Viewing (group exhibition), Loop/B-Part Raum, Berlin, DE
2024 Nowhere Fast (group exhibition), Culterim, Berlin, DE

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

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

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

Publications

🏪 Center for Peripheries … On Paper Issue 4 Read & Download

🧢 Center for Peripheries … On Paper Issue 3 Read & Download

🥫 Center for Peripheries … On Paper Issue 2 Read & Download

📦 Center for Peripheries … On Paper Issue 1 Read & Download

Lectures & Talks

2026 FIG Festival for Illustration & Graphics, Sofia, BG
2026 Artist Talk, Ljubljana Art Weekend, SI
2025 Sharing Food, Writing Recipes, Sulina, RO

Press
CBS, 2026 Watch
ABC, 2026 Watch
Les Nouveaux Riches, 2026 Read
Most Magazine, 2026 Read
Contemporary Lynx, 2026 Read
e-flux, 2026 Read
Interview with Komplex Kulturmagazin, 2024 Read
Tiroler Tageszeitung, 2024 Read
Büro für gegenwartskunst, 2024 Read

Exhibitions

Roots of Resilience

Spruce Street Harbor Park,, Philadelphia, Pa.

May – Sep 2026

“Welcoming Soon (After Ken Lum and Šejla Kamerić)” is a response to the constant duality of being an immigrant anywhere in the world. On the one side, being cherished, celebrated for one’s successes and resilience; on the other, being blamed, feared, and always placed under a microscope. This flag is meant to poke fun at this special attention, treading lightly towards the welcoming attitudes and piercing through internalized notions of who is allowed to claim territories (as the gesture of planting a flag connotes), or who is “welcomed” into them, even if they are often shaped by the very contributions of those who arrive from elsewhere.

https://www.delawareriverwaterfront.com/what-we-build/waterfront-arts-program/waterfront-arts-projects/roots-of-resilience-the-2026-drwc-flag-exhibition/center-for-peripheries

Curated by Libby Rosa

around every circle another can be drawn

Ravnikar Gasllery, Ljubljana, Slovenia

May – Aug 2026

Emerging from the framework of ETC. Magazine’s fifth issue, Full Circle, the exhibition around every circle another can be drawn, brings together artistic positions that engage with migration, displacement, borders, and the unstable construction of collective memory across the regions stretching from the Balkans to the Baltics.

History, identity, and belonging are never fixed, but continuously reshaped through movement, rupture, and return. The title of the exhibition, borrowed from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay Circles, reflects on the impossibility of definitive endings. Every border implies another threshold, every displacement another beginning, and every historical formation the possibility of transformation.

Rather than presenting a singular narrative about these processes, the exhibition unfolds through a polyphony of perspectives, methodologies, and artistic languages. The exhibited works move between personal testimony and collective history, tracing how large-scale political transformations become embedded within intimate experiences, inherited trauma, labour, language, and the material conditions of everyday life. The official histories are confronted by fragmented memories, personal narratives, overlooked testimonies, archives, and material traces that exist outside institutional frameworks. In this context, acts of remembering become inseparable from acts of resistance.

around every circle another can be drawn does not offer a fixed or closed narrative. It holds space where multiple histories, perspectives, and temporalities intersect without collapsing into a singular conclusion. Like Emerson’s expanding circles, the works gathered here remind us that identity, memory and geography remain in constant motion, continuously unfolding, continuously renegotiated, and always capable of becoming something else.

https://ravnikar.org/etc-

Curated by: ETC. and Vasil Vladimirov

Positions on Freedom. Design and Its Boundaries

Museum of Applied Art, Frankfurt, Germany

May – Jun 2025

Is design a tool of liberation, oppression, or both at once? The exhibition treated its title as a method and unfolded the topic as a spectrum across three interconnected formats: a group exhibition developed through an open call and in collaboration with the museum, newly commissioned works by invited designers (fellows), and a reader featuring theoretical contributions and conversations.
In this iteration of the work by Center for Peripheries, the selected labels are specifically oriented towards the theme of freedom within political relations — whether as justification, instrument, or objective. The work questions how freedom is produced, distributed, and instrumentalised through everyday objects and global interdependencies.

https://www.museumangewandtekunst.de/en/visit/exhibitions/2026/positions-on-freedom-design-and-its-boundaries/

Curated by: Anton Rahlwes and Vera Sacchetti

Pillar of Societies

Neue 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/

Essen

Gruppe 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 Viewing

Loop 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 Fast

Culterim, 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

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