Wildfire I

What does friendship mean in the time of genocide? A time when many lifelong associations have turned cold and an abundance of new kinships have formed overnight. A time when all kinds of people have intuitively gravitated towards each other while struggling to regain balance in a shattered world, in need of a simple acknowledgement of their shared humanity. Have the familiar patterns of friendship not altered - in a new rhizomatic formation - with strangers having come together in a moment of collective grief bearing? 

Berlin-based Pakistani artist Bani Abidi thinks through heartbreak and society, and introduces us to new allies and old friends. Friendships from the past two years formed on the fringes of artistic practice, but not due to it. Rather, they grew over Instagram posts, cooking and eating, organizing, grieving, raging and walking together. Two years on they seem to exude an impermeable and formidable force, intrinsic to our survival. Here she asks how we lean on, take from and carry forward each other’s tireless minds and labour; poetry and art? 

In the first of a set of three screenings titled Wildfire, we watch films by five Berlin-based artists: Candice Breitz, Basma Alsharif, Pinar Öğrenci, Heba Y. Amin and Sylvia Schedelbauer. The works offer diverse narratives about familial and political histories, the politics of witnessing, social alienation and friendship.

The screenings will be followed by a discussion between Abidi and Omar Kasmani: her old friend and Berlin-based cultural anthropologist. A reading of Kasmani's set of texts 'Love is a City in Anguish' will be followed by a conversation around conviviality, migrant belonging and political heartbreak.

6-7:30pm - Film screenings

7:45-8:30pm - Bani Abidi & Omar Kasmani in conversation 

FILMS

Candice Breitz - Dear Esther (May 1943), 2025 (9:00) 

In her series of short films titled Dear Esther, Breitz reckons with the experience of living in contemporary Germany, a nation in which atonement for a genocidal past is too often expressed in the form of support for the ongoing genocide in Israel-Palestine. Narrated in the artist’s own voice, each film in the series takes the form of a letter addressed to the late musician and antifascist activist Esther Bejarano (1924–2021), who survived Auschwitz as a young woman, only to face accusations of antisemitism in her later life on the basis of her vehement criticism of Israeli oppression of Palestinians. 

Commissioned by steirischer herbst 2025 

Basma Al Sharif - Morgenkreis, 2025 (20:31) 

A short visceral narrative film unfolds in three parts to describe loss. From our earliest experience of separation to the imperceptible violence associated with integrating to a new country when yours is no longer liveable, Morgenkreis follows a father and son in their intimate rituals as they prepare to start the day and head to kindergarten. 

Pinar Öğrenci - Hotel Miks, 2023 (17:03) 

Avalanches are a regular and deadly occurrence in Miks, an old Armenian–Kurdish town where roads remain blocked by snow for nine months of the year. Cut off from the rest of the world during this time, playing chess in cafés becomes a daily ritual that helps its people endure. The artist continues to explore the chess metaphor as a tool of resistance, struggle, and negotiation, re-evaluating the video material from her film Aşît – The Avalanche, produced for documenta fifteen in 2022. The work is slightly inspired by Stefan Zweig’s last novel, The Royal Game (Schachnovelle, 1941), in which the main character, Dr. B., is imprisoned by the Nazis in a hotel room and turns to chess as a survival mechanism in the face of fascism. In this context, the hotel becomes an architectural symbol of totalitarian regimes. Pınar Öğrenci portrays her father’s hometown, Miks in Wan, as a hotel where dissident citizens are treated as guests. In this setting, living conditions cannot be altered, and people are compelled to endure their circumstances. The video’s soundtrack—featuring the Armenian duduk and the Kurdish zurna—evokes the shared cultural heritage of the two communities that once lived together before the Armenian Genocide of 1915. 

*Hotel Miks includes video materials that has been realized in the framework of documenta fifteen. 

Heba Y. Amin - Iterations on Witnessing: Suite I, 2025 (23:27) 

Iterations on Witnessing is a durational film and unfolding archive that navigates the paradoxes of vision—what is seen, what is hidden, and what is intentionally left out. Taking inspiration from the neurological phenomenon of 'blindsight'—or subconscious seeing—the project unfolds in a series of sequential segments or 'variations' connected to the artist's research and travels that collectively interrogate the ethics and violence of seeing. By mobilizing the act of 'witnessing' as both subject and structure, the work asks: What does it mean to see, and to not know what one has seen? How do we record without claiming, observe without extracting, remember without possession? 

Sylvia Schedelbauer - Memories, 2024 (19:16) 

Growing up in Japan’s bubble economy, a woman questions her parents’ silence about the past. With a box of family photos, she tries to assemble her own version of their history.