In the organizer's words:

Hope أمل
A solo exhibition by the artist Jamila Barakat
Opening on December 3, 2025 at the Galerie im Turm

04.12.2025 - 01.02.2026

Hoffnung أمل explores memory as resistance and belonging as an ongoing practice. Using collage as a central medium, Barakat assembles a fragile topography of text, photography, sculpture, painting and drawing. A cross-spatial sound work in collaboration with Maryam Fazeli opens up a further level in which voice and space merge.

"What happens when a country forgets how to breathe?"¹

This question is both a starting point and a resonance chamber. Collage functions here as an artistic principle to connect breaks, traces and voices.

The visible and the invisible, the past and the present intertwine and open up a field in which memory becomes action.

The works follow movements between Palestine, Kuwait, the Emirates, Lebanon, Syria, Ukraine and a divided Germany up to the present day in Berlin. These overlaps do not create a closed narrative, but rather a fabric of fragments that questions the possibility of continuity.

أمل (amal , Arabic for hope) reveals itself as a silent persistence of continuing to work. It is not a promise for the future, but a presence in the now, a perseverance that remains when language fails. Hopeأمل reminds us that truth cannot be silenced. One day it will return - through the voices of those who do not stop speaking.

¹ Barakat, "In the Cracks of Silence", Arts of the Working Class No. 36

Events

Dec 3, 2025 | 6 pm

Opening with a performance by the artist and Maryam Fazeli

Dec 11, 2025 | 7 pm (EN)

Presentation and discussion with Forensis e.V.

Jan 7, 2026 | 7 pm (EN)

Guided tour with the artist and curator

Jan 14, 2026 | 7 pm (EN)

Guided tour with the artist and curator

Jan 24, 2026 | 2 pm (DE)

Collage workshop for young people, organized by the artist and Elvis Osmanović

Jan 31, 2026 | 7 pm (DE)

Finissage with an artist talk moderated by Priya Ravi

Jamila Barakat is a Palestinian-German artist, author and educator from Berlin. Her work links personal memory with collective history and explores how identity, belonging and resistance are inscribed in the body, language and archive. She creates spaces in which loss, transformation and hope enter into dialog with one another.

As co-founder of the Interspace collective, a curatorial platform for marginalized and emancipatory perspectives, she develops projects that make solidarity and communal responsibility tangible. She has been working with children and young people in Berlin's Wedding district for several years and designs participatory formats in which artistic work becomes a process of self-empowerment. Barakat's practice understands the archive as a living place of witnessing, where the repressed remains visible and returns to the cultural dialog. Her work asserts memory as a resistant force in times of institutional erasure.

The exhibition is curated by Frances Breden.