IMAGINING KUNSTHALLE #2 You May Own the Lanterns but We Have the Light

curated by Gabriela Löffel / 15 November 2026 – 11 April 2027 / Kunsthalle

Alongside her solo exhibition, Gabriela Löffel curates the second edition of Imagining Kunsthalle. The format invites video artists to present their own works alongside works by other artists who have shaped, challenged or accompanied their practice, in the projection room at the Kunsthalle’s historic brick kiln. The result is a selection that is both an artistic statement and a space for collective experience.

With works by

Basma al-Sharif
Marwa Arsanios
Haig Aivazian
Border Forensics
Miranda Pennell
Mohamed Choucair

The selected contributions explore how political events are remembered and represented, how state violence can be made visible, and the role played by archives, audio recordings, animation, forensic imagery and testimonies in this process. The works open up new perspectives on the conceptual field underpinning Löffel’s practice.

Basma al-Sharif (b. 1983) is a Palestinian artist and filmmaker based in Berlin. Through a precise visual language and black humour, her artistic practice addresses ongoing violence and its representation, while exploring the legacy of colonialism within inescapable structures of power. In her film Old Masters (2025), al-Sharif, together with two fellow artists and close friends who also collaborated on her earlier film Ouroboros (2017), which reflects on the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of Israel’s 2014 war, examines the question of whether genocide can be described at all.

Marwa Arsanios (b. 1978) is an artist, filmmaker and researcher based between Berlin and Beirut. Her films, installations and performances examine political history from feminist and anti-colonial perspectives. Drawing on issues of the pan-Arab cultural magazine Al-Hilal and the film La Bataille d’Alger (1957), Have You Ever Killed a Bear? or Becoming Jamila (2014) examines the shifting representations of Jamila Bouhired, an Algerian resistance fighter. Arsanios asks how a historical figure becomes a political icon, a media figure and a screen for projection, and how feminist projects are either supported or marginalised within anti-colonial struggles.

Haig Aivazian (b. 1980) lives and works in Beirut. Through video, animation, installation, drawing and performance, he examines how power intervenes in bodies, architectures and landscapes through technical and material systems. Recurring themes in his work include artificial light, computation, law, surveillance and the regulation of public space. You May Own the Lanterns but We Have the Light, Episode 3: Children of Darkness (2025) is part of an animated series exploring the political governance of light and darkness. Found animation footage is redrawn, altered and reassembled. Light emerges not as a neutral medium, but as an infrastructure that governs surveillance, movement and public order, and can be appropriated as a means of resistance.

Border Forensics is a research agency based in Geneva that investigates state and institutional violence using spatial, visual and technological methods. Its analyses combine human rights work, research and visual practice, with the aim of promoting public and legal accountability. The audiovisual investigation The Death of Roger Nzoy Wilhelm (2025) reconstructs the death of Roger Nzoy Wilhelm, who was shot dead by a police officer at Morges railway station in 2021. Through spatial, visual and temporal analysis, the work develops a counter-investigation that scrutinises official accounts and raises questions of truth and institutional responsibility.

Miranda Pennell (b. 1963) is a London-based filmmaker whose films frequently reinterpret images from British colonial archives to reflect on contemporary situations. Her work emphasises the role of imagination in interpreting historical documents. In Man number 4 (2024), she undertakes a detailed analysis of images of an arrest in Gaza that she discovered on social media in 2023, examining her own position as a witness.

Bringing together the solo exhibition and the curated video programme, the project forms a coherent whole that interrogates political, economic and media power relations from different perspectives and generates counter-narratives. Rather than offering simplified explanations, the exhibition foregrounds close looking and listening, creating a space in which complex relationships can be made accessible to the public and critically examined.