Sunday, 15 March 2026, 11:00–16:00 / Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, Utrecht
Language: Kurdish and Dutch. English translations can be provided.
11:00 Doors open
12:00 Presentation of the book and dialogue
13:30 Workshop
Program includes Kurdish food and music throughout the day.
We warmly invite you to the first Netherlands launch of Avan Omar’s publication Zero Art, accompanied by a collective workshop, Palimpsest of Rooflines. This afternoon forms part of her artistic proposal for our forthcoming Spring program, move not for reason but love.
Book launch
Zero Art is a multidisciplinary, research-led publication by Avan Omar that examines how political, social, and economic upheavals shaped artistic production in South Kurdistan between 1990 and 2010. The book reflects on a period of radical transformation, when artists navigated displacement and loss while new possibilities for mobility and exchange emerged, in the wake of the Gulf War, uprisings, sanctions, mass migration, and the collapse of the Saddam regime in 2003.
Documenting South-Kurdish artworks, performances, installations, and documentary materials alongside artist interviews and archival research, the publication serves as both a vital cultural archive and a counter-institutional framework. It amplifies and rectifies the region’s voices, long underrepresented in international art contexts. Developed through remote conversations, field research, and contributions from other artists, Avan’s project culminated in two books in Kurdish, designed and printed in the Netherlands.
During the afternoon, Avan offers further insight into the research, with time afterward for dialogue and reflection. Copies of the book are available for purchase.
Collective workshop
Avan leads the workshop Palimpsest of Rooflines, whose results are set to feature in her upcoming exhibition, opening on 11 April. In the workshop, participants collectively recreate their (former) homes from memory using mud and line as expressive materials. Through this process, private recollections are transformed into a shared landscape of belonging, creating space for reflection on the concept of home and the places we inhabit.
This communal work is related to Hemn Hamed’s project Representing Memory in the Citadel of Erbil, which responded to the displacement of the Kurdish community living in the Citadel of Erbil—one of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited sites, with a history spanning over 6,000 years. Vacated in 2006 under the pretext of restoration, its residents were never allowed to return. Hamed established a temporary gallery in two former shops in the New Citadel, where participants collectively reconstructed the Citadel using mud and lines, relying entirely on memory rather than photographs or archival references. The outcomes of the project also included a video work and interviews with the participants, both of which are likewise set to feature in Avan’s exhibition.
