We welcome Ahmad Darkhabani to work on the curatorial concept titled "there is no end to what a living world will demand of you*". Over the next 7 weeks, Ahmad will craft the future open call, which will revolve around the notions of the fragility of reality and life. He will examine themes related to death and the anxiety surrounding it, the continuous decay leading to an end, the vulnerability of the human body, and the unsustainable forms of capitalist life established upon the ruins of collapsing infrastructures. As a result, Ahmad will invite artists to look at notions of dying or being alive through an anti-capitalist lens; to explore what kinds of care systems might emerge if our relationships were grounded in recognising and accepting each other's and the planet's capacities and limitations. Furthermore, artists will reflect on the slow process of deterioration toward an end, thinking about death as a force that defines the rhythm and meaning of being alive.
Ahmad Darkhabani is an architect, independent curator, researcher, and writer originally from Damascus, Syria. He is currently based in Graz, Austria, where he teaches as a Lecturer at the Institute for Contemporary Art (IZK) within the Faculty of Architecture at Graz University of Technology.
*The title is a quote from Octavia Butler’s novel Parable of the Sower (1993)
Curator-in- Residence Ahmad Darkhabani
Illustration: ©EMIRHAKIN
What does it mean to make art while giving something of yourself away – bit by bit, until nothing feels whole anymore? This project explores the silent tolls, bruises of a burn-out, and institutional dynamics embedded in artistic labor. Framed as a curatorial proposition and future open call, it invites artists working in moving image, writing, sound, and performance to reflect on “Sacrifice” – not only as loss, but as a method of resistance. It reimagines the artist residency as a site of retreat, rupture, and refusal – a space for those worn down by systems demanding silence in exchange for belonging. Here, Hollabrunn, imagined as the tenth village*, becomes a space for those pushed to the margins for speaking out – for confronting power, for choosing discomfort over compliance. What does it cost to stay visible – and what do we risk or sacrifice, when we decide to do things ‘differently’?
EMIRHAKIN poses urgent yet open questions about the influence of contemporary politics on our human psyche. Navigating through the ever-changing signs and symbols of our times, the artist is mainly curious about the things that are being put in places that they are not supposed to be, serving as reminders that meaning often emerges through this arbitrariness.
* visit the longer version of the text I LOST IT SLOWLY, NO ONE NOTICED for the full context behind the “tenth village.”
Curator-In-residence emirhan akin
Illustration: still from Alain Resnais
What escapes the archive? What lingers in its margins, what refuses to be named or ordered? Shadow Index is a curatorial exploration unfolding in Hollabrunn, shaped by fragments, tensions, and material traces: ceramic vessels, amethyst veins, layered landscapes, ghostly forests. It looks for memory outside of language — in objects, stones, silences, gaps. Drawing on Jacques Derrida and Alain Resnais, it turns toward archival voids and omissions, treating them not as absence but as spaces of potential. During the seven-week residency, Agata Ciastoń will work with different registers of memory to develop the idea of a future open call. Not a theme defined in advance, but one that emerges from the place itself, through attention, research, and time. The Shadow Index is not a fixed theme. It is an evolving question: how do we work with what resists capture, and what forms of knowledge arise in its place?
Agata Ciastoń is a freelance curator, researcher, and author based in Wrocław, Poland, with a PhD in cultural studies. Her work explores borders, memory, and territories through archival materials and visual narratives, focusing on ambiguous landscapes and relationships between humans and animals, plants, and things.
Curator-In-residence Agata Ciastoń