Basak Senova: Mirror Project
Film Screening & Book Launch
As one of the projects of Agrigento, Italian Capital of Culture for 2025, the “Mirror” project was realised in collaboration with “The Atlas (of Creative Mechanisms): [Curating–Conducting]”.
Curated by Basak Senova and Jonatan Habib Engqvist, the project partnered with eight institutions across Europe (Istanbul Modern, Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna), Kunsthaus Dahlem (Berlin), Liljevalchs Konsthall (Stockholm), National Museum of Modern Art (Zagreb), The Art Rooms, ARUCAD (Kyrenia), CVAR Centre of Visual Arts and Research (Nicosia) and The Reykjanes Art Museum). Consisting of three interconnected chapters, the third chapter entails the presentation the film programme and the book at the partner institutions in 2026.
Screening of the ACT III
- Introduction by Basak Senova
- Ali Cherri: The Watchman, 2023, 26 minutes
- Nisrine Boukhari: The State of Water, 2024, 22 minutes
- Marcus Neustetter: The Ashes, 2024, 3 minutes
- Q&A with Basak Senova
Ali Cherri: The Watchman, 2023
Set in Cyprus, “The Watchman” follows Sergeant Bulut, who spends long nights in a remote watchtower awaiting an enemy who never arrives. This suspended state produces a time marked by repetition, anticipation, and unease. Gradually, strange lights appear on the horizon, hinting at presences drawn from histories of conflict that have left enduring marks on collective memory. Cherri uses this liminal setting to examine the psychological and ideological weight of duty, revealing how the logic of war persists even without active confrontation. The soldier’s isolation becomes a framework for exploring how vigilance transforms into anxiety and how inherited narratives of threat shape identity. Through its restrained pacing, the work exposes the lingering influence of militarised thinking and the difficulty of disentangling oneself from a past defined by violence and expectation.
Nisrine Boukhari: The State of Water, 2024
“The State of Water” is a visual and poetic interpretation of the separation of space and time through fragmented dialogue between three characters: Past, Present, and Future. The interplay of light, shadow, and water becomes a metaphor for the dissolution of identity, memory, and structure. Slowness, and the text aligned with the rhythm of sea waves create hypnotic visuals, letting the mind wander, playing with perception, and forgetting the characters’ words. The film lingers in moments where meaning drifts, allowing time itself to become a protagonist. Reflections and refractions unsettle the boundaries between the three voices, transforming the dialogue into a fluid exchange that resists linearity.
Marcus Neustetter: The Ashes, 2024
By returning to the waters where he released his late father’s ashes seven years earlier, Marcus Neustetter confronts both memory and absence. His gestures of tracing and drawing become an attempt to capture the intangible, the shifting horizon, the rhythms of the ocean, and the persistence of loss. While these marks acknowledge the futility of holding onto fading memories, they also embody what cannot be expressed in words. Neustetter’s ongoing search for visual and performative strategies to articulate what is often left unspoken here engages directly with grief and its suppression. In collaboration with musicians Micca Manganye and Anathi Conjwa, the silence of loss is reimagined through ritualised rhythm, improvised sound, and song. Together, the work transforms private mourning into a shared call for emotional connection, echoing the artist’s moment of reflection at the water’s edge.
Information
- The event is free of charge.
- Basak Senova will introduce the project and the publication in English.
- The “Mirror” project was executed in collaboration with “The Atlas (of Creative Mechanisms): [Curating–Conducting]”, a PEEK project awarded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and hosted by the Institute of Art Sciences and Art Education at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.
Kunsthalle Wien
