SETAREH, Berlin · May 2 – June 13, 2026
Stepping into the SETAREH gallery space in Berlin, you immediately feel that the works hanging on the walls are far more than silent witnesses. Bringing together Iranian artist and filmmaker Nazanin Hafez and Iraqi-German artist Raisan Hameed for the first time, the exhibition “Re-Trace” shatters the “reliable” nature of photography and the image, drawing the viewer into the uncanny waters of memory, war, and state violence.
Though rooted in different geographies and histories, the exhibition brings into dialogue two staggering practices that read the image as a political battlefield—an apparatus produced and controlled by power.
Nazanin Hafez: Deconstructing the Regime’s Narrative
On one side of the space is Nazanin Hafez, whose work is built directly upon her personal experiences regarding the political oppression of the Iranian regime. Navigating between digital and analog photography, film, and collage, the artist constantly pushes the mind toward the same eerie tension: the complicity between an image and the power structures that produce it.
Undoubtedly, one of Hafez’s most striking productions in the exhibition is the collage series titled Spectators. In this series, the artist performs a visual intervention by infiltrating the websites of international press agencies. As you approach the works, you realize that state violence is not merely something inflicted; it is also a theater systematically staged, orchestrated, and meticulously constructed. In Hafez’s hands, collage ceases to be a simple act of cut-and-paste and transforms into a powerful “counter-image,” offering an aesthetic of civil defiance against official images that are ordered to go unquestioned.
Raisan Hameed: The Heavy Burden of Lost Pixels
As you transition to the other side of the gallery and enter the world of Raisan Hameed, outward political rage is replaced by a more introspective, melancholic scab. Hameed uses his own biography as a gateway into massive questions regarding war, memory, and images that cannot be protected.
Focusing on family archives, damaged photographs from Mosul, and digital tools like Google Maps, the artist is drawn to those dark spots where the camera or the image “fails.” In the Zer-Störung series, the worn family photos rescued from Mosul are not just memories; they become evidence, carrying the history of that region’s destruction within their very physical degradation. In the Pixels of Memories series, the digital glitches and missing pixels left by Google Street View on the streets of Iraq carry a reality as heavy as the things actually visible on the screen. Hameed whispers to us that photography is never absolute proof, but rather a fragile object caught between the desire to remember and the impossibility of fully achieving it.
Two Different Directions, A Single Confrontation
Re-Trace presents the works these two artists have torn from the heart of realities that continue to bleed, framed within a flawless conceptual dialogue. While Hafez turns her gaze outward toward the public circulation of state violence and the hypocrisy of the media, Hameed turns his gaze entirely inward toward the private archive and personal devastation.
In an era where we are dictated what we should “see,” this exhibition currently running in Berlin offers a staggering stop for reconsidering the power of images, what they intentionally hide, and what it means to reject the visuality imposed upon us.
Exhibition Details:
- Artists: Nazanin Hafez, Raisan Hameed
- Exhibition: Re-Trace
- Venue: SETAREH, Berlin
Dates: May 2 – June 13, 2026
