Baris Dogrusoz and Nour Shantout

Baris Dogrusoz

Working across video, sculpture, and installation, Barış Doğrusöz uses archival material, archaeological documentation, and architectural forms to critique how knowledge and territory are spatially and materially encoded through military infrastructure and visual language. His practice often engages in what he terms "prequels and premonitions for a near future fiction", examining how geopolitical and historical narratives are constructed.

For his work INTERSTICES (a dizzying array of combinations), Doğrusöz reimagined his installation Interstices, a dizzying array of combinations (2018), composed initially of 45 abstracted sculptures based on the form of pillboxes, with small apertures for weapons commonly found across Lebanon, Palestine, and conflict zones near sensitive targets like official buildings or interstitial sites like checkpoints. These structures are specifically designed to be invisible or impenetrable in their form while also constructing the boundaries or borders of access.

Doğrusöz's serial presentation strips them of their original function, transforming them into diagrammatic civilian forms. For we refuse_d, the artist expanded the installation with newly produced sculptures, informed by updated research and architectural military artifacts that reflect post-war developments in Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria.

The work serves as both a formal study of militarised architecture and critical response to the shifting political realities of the region. By cataloguing and abstracting these "extropic masks," Doğrusöz builds a lexicon of resistance, mapping how oppressive structures may be reinterpreted as artifacts of memory and critique. This version of Interstices underscores his commitment to redefining spatial narratives and contesting hegemonic frameworks of historical knowledge.

Nour Shantout

Grounded in a deep engagement with Palestinian embroidery (tatreez), Nour Shantout’s work treats this traditional craft not merely as heritage, but as a living, resistant archive, one that embodies identity, counter-memory, and intergenerational knowledge.

Her research-based projects trace intimate personal narratives and collective histories, particularly within contexts of displacement and marginalisation, such as the Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon. In Searching for the New Dress, Shantout reflects on the transmission of memory and the circulation of embroidered dresses between generations of women in exile, revealing how garments become vessels of everyday survival, counter-mapping, and cultural resilience.

From a postcolonial feminist perspective, Shantout examines the aesthetics of ethnographic display and the structures of institutional knowledge production. She questions how histories are told, who tells them, and through which media. Through layered narrative methodologies and community-based workshops, she cultivates alternative forms of archiving that are grounded in lived experience, embodied practices, and radical care.

Evidence responds to intensified censorship through the emergence of new visual codes. Artists and cultural workers often blur faces in online documentation—a protective gesture that transforms pixelated squares into subtle symbols of an era marked by constraint. This work reflects on the evolving relationship between language, medium, and temporality. As screenshots of social media posts are used to silence or undermine cultural voices, the exhibition space shifts from a mere site of display to one of negotiation, risk, and resistance. It invites us to consider how acts of refusal of revealing less, of withholding faces—can paradoxically assert presence and agency.