NAZANIN HAFEZ, RAISAN HAMEED

Nazanin Hafez’s practice is rooted in her personal experience of political oppression under the Iranian regime. Working across digital and analogue photography, film, and collage, Hafez consistently returns to a central tension: the relationship and dynamics between the image and the power structures that produce it. She is particularly drawn to the boundaries of depicting scenes of violence and their actors and victims, always seeking an empathetic and dignified approach to difficult subject matter. A key body of work is her collage series Spectators, for which Hafez intervenes in the websites of Iranian and international press agencies. She draws attention to the way that state violence is not only enacted but requires staging, orchestration, and execution to be conducted on a systematic scale. Artistically, collage becomes a form of counter-image, showing a way of handling and appropriating images that were never meant to be questioned. This concern with what images do — how they circulate, who they serve, what they conceal — runs through her broader practice, shaping both her material choices and her ethical approach to representing violence and its victims.

Raisan Hameed’s practice moves between the personal and the collective, using his own biography as an entry point into larger questions about war, memory, and what images can and cannot be preserved. Working with family archives, found photographs, digital tools like Google Maps, Hameed is consistently drawn to the places where images fail — where they are damaged, pixelated, missing, or incomplete. Rather than treating these gaps as problems, he makes them the subject. In Zer-Störung, deteriorated family photographs from Mosul are re-purposed as artworks, where their raw material explores how destruction functions as both the history of these photographs and is inscribed in the images themselves. In Pixels of Memories, errors and absences in Google Street View footage of Iraq carry as much weight as what is actually visible. Across these projects, the photograph is never simply evidence — it is a fragile and unreliable object, caught between the desire to remember and the impossibility of fully doing so.

Re-Trace is an encounter, an opportunity to put into dialogue two practices that, while rooted in distinct geographies and histories, share a profound and urgent engagement with the image as a political site — something produced, distributed, and controlled by power. Both Hafez and Hameed are making work from within ongoing realities, from the inside of experiences that have not concluded, and both have developed practices that push back against the conditions those realities impose. Where Hafez turns outward, intercepting the public circulation of images of state violence, Hameed turns inward, excavating the private archive and the personal wound. Re-Trace is a still moment to re-think images — the power of what they show and the necessity of what they suppress, and what it means to refuse the terms on which they were made.