States of Being Bundled in Darkness
May 2026 – March 2027
ISTANBUL, DIYARBAKIR
Affiliate: Pariyya Ferdosse
States of Being Bundled in Darkness is a research- and process-based exhibition project to be realised in Diyarbakır. The project focuses on forms of production excluded from the archive, deemed insignificant, or considered unworthy of record, as well as traces of suppressed living and non-living beings. Proposing an artistic process that multiplies through encounters, the project investigates how policies sustained across different historical layers have obscured life, language, memory, and, in particular, women’s forms of production in the region.
The exhibition focuses on the interrupted, rendered invisible, or undocumented artistic practices of women artists under political pressure, as well as transitional states between absence and emergence, erasure and permanence. The beam of light, one of the central elements of the works, is approached as a concentrated trace of suppressed memories and invisible phenomena. It seeks to render visible the threshold-like presence of beings that cannot be fully seen, yet have not been erased.
The research and exhibition process, to be conducted together with Iranian curator Pariyya Ferdosse, aims to establish deeper relationships with the local context and regional memory. While the outcomes of the research process will take the form of site-specific installations, video, photography, and painting, the public programmes developed around the exhibition will create a space for reflecting on silenced forms of being together with women artists, researchers, and cultural practitioners. Rather than treating invisibility as a passive state of absence, the project approaches it as a form of existence that speaks from beneath the veil and develops forms of resistance through its vulnerabilities.
Delal Eken
Delal Eken was born in Silvan in 1999 and grew up in Diyarbakır. After completing high school in 2017, she moved from Diyarbakır to Istanbul to prepare for the entrance examinations for art schools. In the same year, she began her BA in the Painting Department at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Marmara University, graduating in 2021.
Between 2021 and 2022, she participated in the 17th Istanbul Biennial’s Working and Research Programme (ÇAP), organised by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV). In 2024–2025, she continued her practice with the support of the Rotary Young Artist Fund. She has participated in group exhibitions organised by institutions including Akbank Sanat, CIF, Zilberman Gallery (GYF), Kasa Gallery, and Elgiz Museum. In 2025, she held her first solo exhibition, Hüzme [Beam], at İMÇ5533, an independent art space located in the Istanbul Manifaturacılar Çarşısı.
Working across painting, video, and installation, Eken explores relationships between visibility and invisibility, suppressed memories, and vulnerable forms of being through material elements such as waste, residue, light, and ink. She lives and works in Istanbul.
Pariyya Ferdosse
Pariya Ferdosse (b. 1988, Tehran, Iran) is a curator, researcher, writer, architect, and senior art director living and working between Tehran and Istanbul.
Her practice moves between curating, writing, research, and spatial design. She approaches curating as a critical and dialogical practice shaped through long-term processes, conversations, and spatial interventions.
She holds academic degrees in Computer Science and Architecture, as well as a diploma in Interior Architecture, and has pursued independent studies in curatorial theory, archival methodologies, art history, and modern and contemporary art from Southwest Asia and North Africa.
Between 2017 and 2022, she was a co-founder and director of several art spaces and galleries in Tehran, where exhibition-making was intertwined with research, spatial experimentation, and collective practices.
Her projects engage with questions of embodiment, memory, layered histories, gender, narrative, and everyday life. Alongside her curatorial practice, writing and research remain parallel modes of inquiry within her essays, translations, talks, and long-term research-based projects.
Connections:
https://delaleken.com/
www.pariyaferdosse.com