Bahzad Sulaiman

I am a Kurdish-Syrian artist living and working in Germany, whose practice is shaped by personal memory, displacement, and transformation. My work is rooted in interdisciplinary research that spans visual, performative, and installative mediums, exploring how objects, spaces, and bodies carry memory, identity, and ecological meaning.

Coming from a background marked by forced migration and cultural marginalization, I engage with systems of belonging and the fluid nature of identity. I approach everyday objects, particularly those from domestic environments, as silent witnesses to lived experience. When recontextualized, they reveal narratives of care, consumption, and resilience. I am drawn to the tension between function and failure, and how moments of obsolescence can create space for reflection and poetic intervention.

My artistic approach, driven by ongoing research, reinterprets sculptural forms by conceptualizing the human body as a "mobile fleshy sculpture" and treating electrical household appliances as archival entities. In recent years, I have worked with light and sound as sculptural, intangible materials. These elements animate discarded forms and offer alternative readings of the familiar. Through community engagement, participatory processes, and cross-disciplinary collaboration, I aim to create immersive environments where viewers are invited not only to observe but to feel, remember, and question.

Ultimately, my work proposes that art can serve as a space for listening. Listening to one another, to the objects we discard, and to the invisible systems that shape our material and emotional lives.

In collaboration with: