FATOŞ İRWEN

Meaning “face to face” or “confronting one another” in Kurdish, Rû Bi Rû approaches Fatoş İrwen’s long-standing engagement with the individual’s struggle for freedom in the face of representations of power, state policies, tradition, and systems of belief through the notion of confrontation.

The confrontation proposed by Rû Bi Rû is not limited to remembering the past; it requires not only facing what has been denied, but also standing before it and being exposed to its gaze. Fatoş İrwen’s engagement with realities that have been suppressed and rendered invisible, left unrecorded, and carried into the present through oral transmission forms the ground for this confrontation, while inviting the viewer into a space she constructs in her own language.

Rather than reducing the stories she has listened to since childhood to images of testimony, İrwen creates new traces from the forms of lived experience, transmitted narratives, and histories carried into the present. Stories excluded from official narratives, censored, or silenced thus emerge not as evidence meant to verify the past, but as images that continue to exist in the present, confronting the viewer with their own position as witness.

Extending into the geography where the artist was born and raised, Rû Bi Rû places the viewer within a land without borders, where different times, bodies, and forms of life intertwine with one another. İrwen’s relationship with objects points to a form of resistance, releasing them from the status of passive fragments left behind by the past. A desire for justice reaching from earth to sky; a strand of hair severed from the body, connecting reality with the imagined while resisting forms of domination. A dried riverbed surrounded by thorns, concealing traces of bodies and violence; a city silhouette overgrown with plants that continue to flourish despite all that has come before, pierced by shafts of light: these elements converge within the exhibition’s geography.

Against the violence of genocidal policies that seek to transform and delimit a geography, İrwen reminds us that earth and water continue to move according to their own temporalities. İrwen traces a line along the riverbed running through the centre of the exhibition space, one that both conceals and reveals. Following this course, water carries and displaces traces of violence, while holding within it the possibility of exposing what lies buried beneath the earth it erodes.

This trajectory also reaches back to the idea of apocalypse in Sûr, her 2023 solo exhibition at Zilberman Berlin. The apocalypse set in motion by Israfil’s call in Sûr gives way in Rû Bi Rû to the gathering of all living beings beyond distinct temporalities and hierarchies on the Day of Judgment. In this realm, where life persists in the aftermath of destruction, past and present, the dead and the living, the human and the non-human exist simultaneously. The Day of Judgment thus ceases to signify an end, becoming instead a space in which all these beings can come face to face.