Huda Takriti’s exhibition Turning Narratives: In Rehearsal explores two different yet interconnected bodies of work. In the video On Another Note, Takriti and her mother return to a family photo album where they encounter Takriti’s grandmother, herself an artist. Refusing to close the family’s past and the world history in which it is imbedded, they look for what else glimmers in the images. In the series of photographs Against Nostalgia two gloved hands stage and cover parts of French colonial-era postcards of Algeria. Both the presented video and the photographic work involve the act of looking at and handling images. There is the rotating and flipping of images, next their colours are inverted or rendered in black and white. There is searching for their weak signals and for what lies outside of the frame.

In doing so, these works, and Takriti's practice in general, probe the status of images—posing questions such as: How do images come to represent history? What can be done with them, especially if they were created to serve a colonial regime? Can such images be turned against themselves and be used to access the past differently? Where can we go with them?

Huda Takriti questions institutions such as the discipline of history or the archive. Her work is also about categories: what do they reveal or hide? Instead of rigid, closed-off categories, Takriti offers vehicles for traversing space and time. Viewers can board them, to travel and see that the past is neither dead nor past, becoming critically aware of their own spectatorship and orientation in this shared world.

Huda Takriti (b. 1990 in Syria, lives in Vienna) superimposes personal and national narratives in her video works and her image-text or text-text collages, aiming to spotlight gaps in historical and national memory. She is currently pursuing a PhD in practice at the Academy of Fine Art in Vienna, where she is examining the notion of archival erasure relating to the (hi)stories of female freedom fighters from the Middle East in times of armed anti-colonial struggle. Questioning the construction and production of historical narratives, as well as the potential that contamination can carry as a way for surviving archival gaps. She completed her master's studies at the TransArts department at the University of Applied Arts Vienna in 2020. She also completed her bachelor's degree at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Damascus, Syria, in 2012. Her work has been awarded several scholarships and prizes, including the Vordemberge-Gildewart Award (2022), the Kunsthalle Wien Prize (2020), and the Camargo Foundation Fellowship (2023), among others.

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The exhibition will be accompanied by a newly commissioned text written by curator Andrea Popelka.

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Huda Takriti