Text by Abdulhamid Kircher and Zoe Bullock 
Edited by Sarah Chaplin Espenon, Abdulhamid Kircher and Zoe Bullock
Designed by Lewis Chaplin

224 pages, 333 plates, 21 × 29cm
Section-sewn debossed
OTA-bound silkscreened softcover

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No night is long enough for us to dream twice

 (a title borrowed from a line by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish) brings together photography and video by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Mohamad Abdouni, Myriam Boulos, Hicham Benohoud, Mohamed Bourouissa, Sabiha Çimen, Hannah Darabi and Abdulhamid Kircher. While these artists work across South West Asia, North Africa and their diasporas, what they share is less a common geography than a relation to 

. Their images emerge from physical and emotional sites where social forces build, break, then build again.

This relation to pressure also mirrors the contemporary conditions of photography, a medium marked by its own thresholds and limitations. Photography has often understood meaning as something that already exists in the world, awaiting capture. Henri Cartier-Bresson’s formulation of the ‘decisive moment’ gives this impulse its enduring form: the singular, privileged instant in which everything is revealed.

The images in this show extend this idea of the decisive moment by laying claim to a moment that cannot be sustained––a flicker of envy, a collision of bodies, a failure of a father, an absurd gesture, the joy of a child––but in capture it is released, and the pressure of the day made temporarily tolerable, before collapsing back into the choppy flow of ongoing life.

Against theoretical frameworks that read photography through loss, trauma or melancholy, these works can be seen as energetically generative rather than elegiac. These images are not only records of what Roland Barthes called the ‘that-has-been’, they bang against, and burst through, the limits of the world.

Like dreams these works do not resolve. Through aesthetic strategies of intensification, they generate states of affective overstimulation in which desire, terror, pleasure and ecstasy accumulate, proliferate and exceed the social conditions that attempt to contain them. In this sense, the exhibition shifts from a modernist faith in the image as revelation toward an understanding of photography as provisional: a 

whose meaning emerges through the conditions of its appearance.

Collectively, these practices disrupt the expectation that photography must explain everything or anything. Through staging, intimate observation, appropriation and montage, these works unsettle familiar narratives between victim and militant, tradition and modernity, visibility and erasure. Like dreams, they open onto a world of greater immediacy: one of bodily sensation, fractured states, and energetic abundance, all intermingling.

If ‘to dream’ names a form of individual and collective imagination, 

 suggests that the political role of the image in its capacity to shape how reality appears is in a stage of ongoing negotiation and always unresolved. What can be seen in these works is not a more truthful representation of South West Asia and North Africa, but a shift in the conditions through which these places, histories and identities become legible. In doing so, the exhibition explores visual grammars that disrupt inherited modes of seeing and expand the potentials of contemporary photography.

 is presented by AGWA’s Simon Lee Foundation Institute of Contemporary Asian Art and curated by Dalia Al-Dujaili, Independent Curator and Rachel Cieśla, Lead Creative, Simon Lee Foundation, AGWA.

In his analogue photographic and installative practice, the German-Turkish artist Abdulhamid Kircher (b. 1996) reflects on the consequences of patriarchy and violence, as well as on the search for reconciliation and closeness. He understands his work as a fragmentary, living family album. In doing so, he circles around the absence of the father, a void that becomes a canvas for longing and projection. “Perhaps I am the one who has to love him first,” says Abdulhamid Kircher. The exhibition 

 welcomes visitors with a sprawling panorama of photographs, texts, and archival material. The newly developed installation, 9 meters wide and more than 2 meters high, interweaves scenes, encounters, and farewells between Berlin and Turkey, through which the dynamics of a father-son relationship gradually emerge, like pieces of a puzzle coming together. In this presentation, Abdulhamid Kircher also expands the focus to include his paternal grandfather.

The father-son constellations in the photographs speak of loneliness, addiction, violence, and injury, but also of rapprochement, intoxication, touch, and grief. Kircher’s visual language – vibrant colors, high-contrast lighting moods and emotional frequencies – intensifies the immediacy and vulnerability of his subjects. The darkroom becomes a space of reflection and experience in which memories, relationships, and personal stories come to light.

Curated by Nadine Isabelle Henrich, curator at the House of Photography.
Curatorial assistance: Viktoria Rochambeau, curatorial trainee, House of Photography. 

Rotting from Within

 is Abdulhamid Kircher’s first presentation of the eponymously titled body of work and the first exhibition of the artist at carlier | gebauer. The title captures a feeling which the artist describes as “the unearthing of my father and the generational trauma that exists within the patriarchs of my family; subsequently the task of uncovering my own self amidst the things passed down”. The deeply personal aspect of Kircher’s practice is mirrored in his site-specific approach to the blank exhibition space of the white cube. These installations include photographs taken by the artist, as well as archival images and biographical artifacts. Kircher and his partner, Zoe Bullock, create each of the installations in reaction to the space, working on site with an inkjet printer, choosing to vary the format of the prints with each iteration of the installation, rearranging the prints on the exhibition walls. With this approach a constant flux emerges in the work, introducing fluidity in the seemingly fixed medium of photography. Kircher’s installation requires the artist’s hand, even though as photographs they could be potentially endlessly reproduced from afar. This present absence is a recurring theme in Kircher’s work, playing out on different levels and pulling the viewer into his own world.

Through his photographic practice Kircher examines possibilities for reconciliation, questions of identity and intimacy, impacts of patriarchy and violence. Rotting from Within can be viewed as a family album in fragments, as proofs of evidence of an ambivalent relationship. A living archive, these works give shape to the relentless attempt to understand filiation and address its wounds and its core. They extend an invitation to grapple with reality as it is unfolding right in front of us while simultaneously being conscious of never coming to terms with what is there. Amid all these difficult entanglements, image taking offers a refuge, imposing a distance to the events witnessed. Kircher is asking himself and the viewer: “Can any of us really see something as it is happening to us?”

The summer of 2014, the first summer Kircher spent with his father after a long rupture in their relationship, marks one of the beginnings of this work. During this summer he turns to photography as a means of documenting, exploring this emerging relationship between his father and him. They spent time together in their native Berlin, and traveled to relatives in Turkey. Over the course of 10 years, Kircher continuously returns to photography in the presence of his father and his extended family. His camera follows them in their daily lives, collecting slice of life moments. Needless to say, the relationship between Kircher and his father expands beyond these 10 years the artist actively examines through photography. Kircher’s installation incorporates a rare image from his mother’s collection, which marks other beginnings for “Rotting from Within”. This image depicts father and son on the day of the artist’s birth. From there the trajectory of his life, their relationship unfolds, skipping over some aspects, zooming in on others, arriving to the summer of 2014 and expanding beyond. The figure of the father is almost omnipresent in these works, Kircher inverts his absence in his life to a seemingly prevalent dominance in the work.

 refers to a feeling described by Abdulhamid Kircher upon the unearthing of his father’s history: the discovery of the generational trauma within the patriarchs of his family and the subsequent task of uncovering the artist’s self amongst the things passed down. Beginning at the age of seventeen with the reacquaintance of his estranged father, recently released from incarceration for selling drugs and attempted murder, Kircher’s self-led journey into photography coincided with a reflection on his past. Born in Berlin and fleeing to the USA at a young age, the camera provided an entry point for intimacy and familiarity with his father and his Turkish culture and heritage while fostering a deep relationship with the photographic medium and its possibilities. 

 weaves a deeply personal, autobiographical thread with photographic vigor and candidness as we penetrate deeper into the psychological questions of identity, the glorification of violence, the myths of masculinity and the veil through which photography provides a mechanism to cope and understand the world. Kircher’s threaded visual voice speaks at the intersection of an internal monologue and a nuanced approach to documentary; through complex assemblages of portraiture, observation, archival documents, diaries and more. 

 contains visual webs of association within which Kircher captures the tension between speculation and reality, the inherent unknowability of even those closest at hand, and how we do not get to choose the life into which we are born.