GROUP EXHIBITION

Taking its title from French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s writing on the fold, the exhibition considers the past and present not as separate or opposing states, but as continually shaping one another. For Deleuze, the fold describes an ongoing process through which forms persist by changing: folding, unfolding, and refolding as they move between different times, contexts, and conditions. Across the exhibition, this becomes a framework for thinking about inheritance itself. What is carried forward is never simply preserved. It is translated, reworked, and made newly present.

Spanning installation, sculpture, textile, moving image, photography, painting, and ceramics, the exhibition brings this proposition into dialogue with practices rooted across Central Asia, the Gulf and their diasporas. Rather than presenting a single geography or narrative, the works reveal unexpected connections between inherited techniques, ecological histories, technological systems, and the body.

Dr. Alfredo Cramerotti and Auronda Scalera, curators of the exhibition, say: “The past is not elsewhere, it is here, folded into the present, waiting in a sculpture, a carpet, a name, a city’s ruins, to be unfolded again. That is exactly what we found tracing these six practices: artists working from different cities and different materials, arriving independently at the same pressure point. A convergence like that is rarely about the artists alone. It says something about the condition each was responding to, one neither could see from inside their own practice.” Textile and weaving emerge as recurring forms through which knowledge is transmitted and transformed. In Conversations with AI (III) (2026), Aziza Kadyri takes the Central Asian tradition of suzani embroidery into an ongoing exchange with generative AI. Traditional patterns move repeatedly between the artist’s hand and computational models, accumulating mistranslations and new interpretations without relinquishing their origins. The work is presented in relation to handmade suzani embroideries, shifting the question away from which form is more authentic towards what happens to authorship and cultural memory as an inherited visual language moves between human and machine.

Almagul Menlibayeva similarly approaches material as a living archive. In The Map of Nomadizing Reimaginings: An Evolving Cyber Textile Map, Iteration 04 (2026), recycled textiles, hand sewing and digital print form an evolving map of Central Asian and Eurasian territories, bringing ancestral knowledge into dialogue with digital processes. This relationship between memory and transformation extends into Mother Water. Gulbibi Balkhash (2024), where myth, environmental loss and the synthetic visual language of the screen converge around Lake Balkhash, a landscape under ecological pressure from mining and agricultural extraction.

This relationship between inheritance and transformation also underpins Manal AlDowayan’s Watch Before You Fall (2023), which draws upon Sadu weaving, a practice historically sustained by Bedouin women. Elsewhere in AlDowayan’s The Emerging series, fragmented female bodies appear caught in the act of crossing a threshold. Limbs emerge from surfaces without resolving into complete figures, holding the body between private and public states, and between what it has been and what it might become.

Elnara Nasirli’s Ghost Bark (2026) traces another genealogy of transformation, moving from the rubber tree’s natural caoutchouc to latex and metallic film. Biological matter and its manufactured descendants are brought together within a single object, destabilising distinctions between organism and technology, origin and imitation.

Sophia Al-Maria tests the exhibition’s premise of continuity and transformation through We Couldn’t Give Her What She Needs and She Became Aggressive (2026), two new paintings created for Baku. Animal figures emerge through rough fields of watercolour, acrylic, graphite and ink, while their titles draw from the language used to justify abandonment, revealing how responsibility can be displaced onto those already excluded. In doing so, Al-Maria complicates the idea of histories unfolding seamlessly across time, drawing attention instead to what is omitted, misread or left outside as images and knowledge are carried forward.

The body becomes another site of transformation in the work of Raya Kassisieh. Thorn Throne (2025) brings goat hair and sheep’s wool into a sculptural form that moves between garment, plant, and armour. Softness and defence occupy the same silhouette, while the organic fibres meet the industrial presence of steel. Across Kassisieh’s works in the exhibition, growth appears not as a stable state but as an act of breaking through, protection, and vulnerability held together within the same form.

These recurrences were not predetermined. They emerge independently across the six practices: weaving as a carrier of knowledge, water as both landscape and memory, the body at a threshold, and materials that retain traces of what they once were. Together, they suggest that cultural forms endure not by remaining unchanged, but through their capacity to adapt, migrate, and be activated again.

The exhibition also resonates with German art historian Aby Warburg’s concept of Nachleben, or afterlife, through which images, gestures, and symbolic forms can disappear and resurface across different historical moments, altered by the conditions through which they have travelled. From a suzani motif interpreted by an AI model to a Bedouin weaving technique entering contemporary sculpture, the works in Everything Folds, Unfolds, Refolds approach inheritance as an active process rather than an archival one.

The past, in this sense, is not elsewhere. It remains folded into a textile, a material, a landscape, a gesture or an image, capable of being unfolded under new conditions and refolded once more.

Opening on 8 October, Everything Folds, Unfolds, Refolds precedes Baku International Arts Festival (BIAF) and Baku Art Weekend (Fly to Baku) 2026 and will remain on view throughout both programmes as part of Baku’s wider autumn cultural season.