THE DESERTED

Artists: Noor Abed, Charlotte Brathwaite and Malick Welli, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, Álvaro Collao León, Miguel Fernández de Castro, Robert »Chi« Machiri, Vrishali Purandare, Salma Shaka (Umm Bahar), ujjwal kanishka utkarsh

Curator: Frida Robles

Programm:

June 23rd // 20:00 - 23:00 // Reading circle, Screening and Performance //

Reading circle of "The Wretched of the Earth" by Franz Fanon

No limit of participants, no registration needed.

June 25th // 19:00 - 24:00 // Exhibition Night // June 25th //

This exhibition opens a space to call for those who have been deserted in the whirlwind of gore capitalist desires, especially taking into account the current genocide and its atrocious acceptance by society. The earth that gets eroded, the community that gets vanished. The power from the plants and the sand and the sun and the sounds and the songs all converge here to call for respite.

To desert, to leave, to abandon. To desert, to forsake, to give up.

Desert, the wasteland, the wilderness, the barren area. The desert, from destruction, from ruin. That which is abandoned, deserted. An unetymological confusion of nothingness. The remaining unproductive, barren, uncultivated, wasted. A forsaking, an undoing. A territory of vastness. Turning things into a desert. A continuing process of erosion. The edification of draught, the fight for the fleeting water, fleeting roots. The thirst for meaning and territory. The result of human activity. To desert, to revolt. To hurt, to damage. The extension of land that has no trees. The lack of life, the sounds of the night, the following of the traces. A deserter, the one who departs without intentions of returning. Belonging to dessertum. Deserving one’s own faith out of one’s own actions. Waterless, treeless region of a considerable extent.

The desert.

Description

FORGOTTEN PARADISE: DREAM THE OTHER SIDE OF THE RIVER, Film + installation, 2022

Charlotte Brathwaite and Malick Welli

Energy cannot be destroyed - it can only be transformed. The legacy of enslavement strips the fullness of life from those caught in its suffocating nightmare. In moving and static images, Director Charlotte Brathwaite in collaboration with Photographer Malick Welli imagine the dreams and nightmares of forcibly enslaved Muslim scholar Omar ibn Said. In shifting projections and large form photographs – the work unfolds as a cinematic ghost song that connects Said’s stolen spirit back to the living presence of his ancestors across the oceans, across time and space. FORGOTTEN PARADISE transforms the darkness of captivity into the light of knowing freedom, and loving family.

Always Underreporting, Lecture-Performance, 2025

Vrishali Purandare

The politics of this work is inherently against the ongoing genocide in Gaza, it has a clear voice and position regarding the same. It moves through different registers and scales in search for a way to talk.

mrigtrishna (mirage), Film, 2012

Ujjwal Kanishka Utkarsh

Located in the middle of nowhere, the salt pans of Kutch (Gujarat, India) have only saline water and no regular supplies. The farming months of October to March witness the salt farmers - the Agariyas, live by the salt pans. For these months the farmers visit their village homes once every fortnight to bathe and collect their supplies. mrigtishna is an attempt to see the salt farmer's life up close, to step beyond the mirage. The film was collaboratively funded by friends and family and the crew volunteered their service for the same. This film is an attempt to look at a seemingly bizarre lifestyle of a salt farmer based in Kutch, Gujarat, India but try and look at it without the awe of which the landscape creates. That is almost impossible but the fact is that Nathuram's life seems the most normal to himself and he doesn’t give two thoughts about the pretty/crazy landscape that this area provides.

Salt, Sand, Silence, Performance-installation, 2025

Salma Shaka (Umm Bahar)

A performance-installation exploring desertification as a colonial tool — how Israeli and Gulf settler ideologies instrumentalize the desert through narratives like “making the desert bloom.” The work focuses on ancestral seeds, soil memory, and rituals of ecological grief and resistance, reflecting on systemic starvation and the politics of scarcity. Through an intimate, sensory setting, the piece invites contemplation on absence, loss, and survival.

Wüstenvisionen, Concert, 2024

Álvaro Collao León

A work inspired by the rich sonorities of Andean wind instruments from South America. This piece weaves together rhythmic and harmonic textures that evoke the spirit of a ritual, where cyclical patterns, microtonal clusters, and layers of sound converge. Through the blending of modern and indigenous instruments, Wüstenvisionencaptures a vivid and immersive sonic landscape, honoring the ancient traditions and natural forces that shape Andean music. The result is an atmospheric journey where repetition and resonance build a bridge between past and present, tradition and innovation.

Our Songs Were Ready for All Wars to Come, Film, 2021

Noor Abed

A 22-minute film of choreographed scenes based on documented folk tales from Palestine. It begins with four minutes of darkness and the haunting sound of a woman’s voice. The perforated edge of the film, occasionally silhouetted by flashes of light, highlights the nature of the work as a mediated document. Images of women performing draw connections between latent stories of water wells and communal rituals associated with disappearance, mourning and death. The only narration in the film is a song, which is sung by Palestinian singer Maya Khaldi. Its lyrics are a collage of different folk tales. The film explores the critical stance of ‘folklore’ as a source of knowledge and its possible connection to alternative social and representational models in Palestine. How can folklore become a common emancipatory tool for people to overturn dominant discourses, reclaim their history and land, and rewrite reality as they know it?

El Nido del Sol (2021), Irradiación (2021), Lagarto (2020), Altamira (2020), El Dorado (2020), Mictlantecuhtli (2023), Crisálida (2017), Tierra y Libertad (2018), Extractivistas (2016), Antes de que estuviéramos en el monte (2016), Acteal (2015), Xipe Tótec, Black Fire Sun (2025), Aria 68 (2023), WE THE PEOPLE (2023), Coyolxauhqui (2017), After America (2021) and Borders (2022)

Colectivo Los Ingrávidos

Selection of films in connection with the desertification of the world, the incandescence of the sun, the irreparable damage of the earth and the potential healing in ritual, nurture and callings.

No hay dónde esconderse en campo abierto, Banners, 2020-2025

Miguel Fernández de Castro

A collection of images coming from the Sonora desert in Mexico.

Listening session, 2025

Robert »Chi« Machiri

A selection of songs and beats to honor the desert and the deserted.

Artists

Noor Abed is an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker. Her practice examines notions of choreography and the imaginary relationship of individuals, creating situations where social possibilities are both rehearsed and performed. Abed was awarded a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris (France) in 2018 and a fellowship at the Raw Material Company in Dakar (Senegal) in 2019. In 2020, she co-founded, with Lara Khaldi, the “School of Intrusions,” an educational platform in Ramallah, Palestine. https://www.instagram.com/noor_abed/?hl=en https://www.instagram.com/schoolofintrusions/?hl=en

Charlotte Brathwaite is an award-winning artist and director known for genre-defying works that span film, theater, music, ritual, installation, photography and immersive performance. Brathwaite’s films, including Forgotten Paradise: Dream the Other Side of the River (2022) and Only When It's Dark Enough You Can See the Stars (2017), have screened nationally and internationally. Her visually poetic work foregrounds Black interiority, memory, and myth through bold formal experimentation. She is also the Co-Founder of Forgotten Paradise Projects (NYC/Dakar) and Malidoma Popenguine in Senegal. https://www.charlottebrathwaite.comhttps://www.instagram.com/interstellartendencies3000/?hl=en

Colectivo Los Ingrávidos is a Mexican film collective founded in 2012 to dismantle the commercial and corporate audiovisual grammar and its embedded ideology. The collective is inspired by the historical avant-gardes, and their commitment to using both form and content against alienating realities. Their methods combine digital and analog mediums, interventions on archival materials, mythology, agitprop, social protests, and documentary poetry. https://www.instagram.com/zonaingravida/?hl=en

Álvaro Collao León is a versatile saxophonist, improviser, composer, and arranger based in Vienna. Known for his innovative compositional voice, Álvaro creates music for a variety of chamber groups, mixed ensembles, and orchestras, often incorporating saxophone and electronics to explore contemporary soundscapes. He is a saxophone and chamber music professor at University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. https://www.alvarocollaoleon.com https://www.instagram.com/alvarocollaoleon_music/?hl=enMiguel

Fernández de Castro is a visual artist based in the Sonora-Arizona borderlands. Through photography, video, sculpture, and writing, his work examines how extractive and criminal economies materially transform a territory while looking at the historical ties between environmental catastrophe, smuggling routes, and forced disappearance. Since 2022 he has been a member of Mexico's National System of Art Creators. He is co-founder of the Altar Centro de Investigación. Lives and works in Altar, Sonora.https://www.miguelfernandezdecastro.com https://www.instagram.com/miguelfernandezdecastro/?hl=en

Robert Machiri is an archivist, a (re)searcher, a transient, and a connector. He connects people, stories, epochs and places by weaving sounds with images, objects with sound, language with silence, spaces with ideas, rituals with utopia. With this unique approach he draws musics from different decades and continents. Making references to mixtape practices, he creates sound travels as well as spaces, in which the audience can meet the spirits of the past and summon a common future. As a duo with Memory Biwa, Robert Machiri was a fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program as Duo Listening At Pungwe in 2021/22. https://www.instagram.com/machirirobert/?hl=en https://soundcloud.com/robert-machiri

Frida Robles is an artist and curator based in Vienna, Austria. She engages in processes of self-questioning and healing, understanding the personal as political. Her artistic practice varies from public art installations to performances to textual work. She lectures at the Theater, Film and Media Studies of the University of Vienna and is a PhD candidate at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. https://cargocollective.com/fridarobles https://www.instagram.com/fri.dance/

Vrishali Purandare is an artist. Her work centers around the questions of the “tragedy” and governance of commons. It delves into some inherent and imposed - geological and social - differences and inequities. Her work begins and happens in the intersections of personal, social and political realms. She has been a lecturer and currently is a PhD in Practice candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. https://www.instagram.com/vrucelee/

Salma Shaka (Umm Bahar) is a Vienna-based multi-media artist and researcher raised between Palestine, Cyprus, Jordan, and the UAE. Her work is an assemblage of the different landscapes she grew up in and is deeply influenced by feeding and foraging rituals from there. She explores the themes of transformation and decay through the long, slow processes of fermentation, jam-making, pickling, and cooking. Food, foremost, acts as a vessel for the summoning of ancestral ghosts and non-human entities who provide lessons of wisdom on climate justice, preservation, and indigenous imagination. https://shakasalma.wordpress.comhttps://www.instagram.com/umm_bahar_/

ujjwal kanishka utkarsh is a Phd-in-Practice candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. He has been trying to develop a form that emerges out of the observational cinema tradition. For ujjwal, this has resonances with John Cage's ideas of beauty and he has explored that through various forms and themes. He has looked at ideas of nothingness, of being in transit and also at labour practices, specifically at peculiar farming practices. In his current ongoing work, he is trying to see if and how through this form he can look at and reflect upon political activity. https://ujkanishka.com

Malick Welli is a Senegalese visual artist who lives and works between Paris and Dakar. His multidisciplinary practice lies at the intersection of fine art, photography, and installation. Through his work, Welli explores profound themes of duality, spirituality, history, and the restitution of memory, offering a nuanced interrogation of identity, belonging, and displacement. His work has recently been exhibited at Express Newark in New Jersey, USA, the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair in Marrakech, Morocco; the Wereldmuseum in Leiden, Netherlands; and the 19M Gallery of the Chanel fashion house in Paris, France. https://www.malickwelli.com https://www.instagram.com/malickwelli/