How can we preserve history when the infrastructures of memory are constantly under attack - by war, by radical shifts of regimes, by the rewriting of narratives? Born in Diyarbakir, a city scarred by civil war, Kurdish artist Ahmet Ögüt approaches art not as an object but as a political and social situation. In this installation, Ogüt returns to the fragile traces of two exhibitions that have largely disappeared from art history: Palestinian Painting (Zacheta, 1980) and the International Art Exhibition for Palestine (Beirut, 1978). The archive of the former is incomplete, neglected as part of Poland's inconvenient socialist past; the latter was almost entirely destroyed, along with its collection of nearly 200 works, during Israeli bombings of Beirut in 1982. As a gesture of care, Ogüt has recreated two works from these vanished archives: Hosni Radwan's In Memory of Palestine and Janet Venn Brown's Zionist Crime, October 1972. Traditionally, copies are considered a lesser form, mere craft. Here, however, replication becomes a subversive act: restoring erased histories, resisting disappearance, and placing them back into the public sphere. Ögüt first applied this method in 2024, recreating works from art collections evacuated from war-torn Kharkiv. By extending the gesture to Palestinian archives, he bridges geographically distant conflicts, underlining our interdependence and the possibility of new translocal solidarities. For Zacheta, Ogüt presents these copies behind panes of magic glass - disappeared and destroyed artworks become visible only when viewers stand directly in front of them. The artist thus shows the vulnerability not only of art but also of fragile human lives and connections. Framed against two large murals that reproduce the visual codes of the 1978 and 1980 exhibitions, his installation restores visibility to what was nearly lost. Through acts of reconstruction, Ogüt insists that art can reactivate forgotten archives, reinsert them into history,…
How can we preserve history when the infrastructures of memory are constantly under attack?
Ahmet Öğüt’s recreation of Hosni Radwan’s In Memory of Palestine (from the 1980 Palestinian Painting exhibition at Zachęta)
part of WHAT ARE OUR COLLECTIVE DREAMS? at Zachęta
zacheta.art.pl/en/wystawy/o...
