Nafis Fathollahzadeh
Khabur
Previous Fellowships: 2020/ 2021
Nafis Fathollahzadeh is an artist and researcher from Iran, based in Berlin. Fathollahzadeh works at the intersection of artistic research, video art and photography.
In the academic years 2020-22, the are a fellow researcher in the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s scholarly program on Authoritarianism and Counter-Strategies and are affiliated with EUME at Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin. They are an art director and co-editor of Momentography of a failure, a multidisciplinary artistic and urban research platform for collaborative thinking, artistic collaborations, digital mapping and publishing. In 2019, Fathollahzadeh was awarded a prize of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie for their project Momentography of a failure. They were the recipients of an DAAD International Scholarship for Artists.
Khabur
Khabur, the longest tributary of the Euphrates in Northeastern Syria, has gone through drastic changes in the last decades resulting in its dry-out since 2019. The film departs from Tell Halaf (an archaeological site in the valley of the Khabur River) and follows the journey of the archeological collection towards Berlin where it has resided since 1930. It traces the circulation of violence in different times and contexts along the Khabur River and engages with the economic and political power relations that have been transforming the landscape of the region, displacing beings, their belongings, and herstories. The film addresses photography and archeology as two disciplines emerging from the colonial-imperial enterprise, critically engaging with the imperial grammar of photographic archives, and examining the ways it could be recycled, reimagined, and rehearsed.
Alle Fellows
