How does living between different places shape a person and an artist? What does "home" mean when places, memories, and belongings are constantly in flux? In conversation with Emily Finkelstein, the artist Manaf Halbouni discusses his artistic practice at the intersection of personal experience, social reality, and political reflection. Based on his current series of works, "Broken Dreams," the conversation explores questions of home and loss, living space and ownership, migration and memory, and the role of art amid growing social and political tensions. A personal conversation about art, identity, and the stories that places leave behind within us.


Wie prägt es einen Menschen und Künstler, zwischen verschiedenen Orten zu leben? Was bedeutet „Zuhause“, wenn Orte, Erinnerungen und Zugehörigkeiten ständig in Bewegung sind? Im Gespräch mit Emily Finkelstein spricht der Künstler Manaf Halbouni über seine künstlerische Praxis zwischen persönlicher Erfahrung, gesellschaftlicher Realität und politischer Reflexion. Ausgehend von seiner aktuellen Werkserie „Broken Dreams“ geht es um Fragen von Heimat und Verlust, Wohnraum und Eigentum, Migration und Erinnerung, aber auch um die Rolle der Kunst in einer Zeit wachsender sozialer und politischer Spannungen. Ein persönliches Gespräch über Kunst, Identität und die Geschichten, die Orte in uns hinterlassen.


26 June 2026 - Nadia Kaabi-Linke Studio, Berlin-Friedrichshain

I am pleased to announce a new commission from the Federal Real Estate Agency (BImA) and the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF). I will transform the interior walls of the new administrative building into conceptual art to inspire and create a welcoming environment for everyone who visits and works there. This is where meaningful connections form that can be lasting and life-changing. I admire the office's compassionate, thoughtful work and am honoured to embody it in my art.

LABES — Arabic for "all is well" — brings together choreographer Selim Ben Safia and conceptual artist Nadia Kaabi-Linke in a powerful interdisciplinary collaboration. Created for four dancers and a musician, the work explores the opposing forces of paralysis and resilience.

At the heart of the performance is a conceptual art installation conceived by Nadia Kaabi-Linke, drawing on her long-term research into Jerusalem's Maghrebi Quarter, which was destroyed in 1967. Evoking the memory of this erased neighborhood through its shadows and absences, the stage becomes a landscape where traces of the past linger. Transparent walls emerge like apparitions, creating a fragile yet luminous environment. The installation serves as the living scenographic foundation of the work: activated, inhabited, and continuously transformed by the dancers and the musician. Through their movements and sounds, it becomes a dynamic space where disappearance, memory, and presence are brought into dialogue — and where the visual language of Kaabi-Linke and the choreographic vision of Ben Safia open a poetic and political territory in which haunting, loss, and endurance converge.

Guided by values that are as powerful as they are simple — the strength of vulnerability, the power of collective experience, and art's capacity to repair — Selim Ben Safia proposes a dance of joy. On stage, five performers from diverse artistic backgrounds — including breakdance, circus arts, contemporary dance, and traditional dance — become both interpreters and carriers of an unwavering faith in the restorative power of human connection.

Infused with the energy of Palestinian dabke, Tunisian traditional rhythms, funeral chants, and the viola da gamba, the performers navigate the tension between what hardens, is buried, or becomes immobilised, and the vital force that continues to pulse within. LABES is ultimately a choreographic gesture of defiance — a work in which dance, music, and visual art come together to affirm life in the face of erasure.

Stretched Perm (2014) inspired composer Laura Marconi to create a new composition for Ways of Coexistence, performed by the Junger Kammerchor Köln on the occasion of their 10-year anniversary.

LABES is a choreographic creation by Selim Ben Safia with scenography by Nadia Kaabi-Linke. The piece explores fragility, resilience, and the silent marks left by places erased from the map. Inspired by the vanished Maghrebi Quarter, LABES rebuilds fragments of walls, memories, and disappearances through movement, space, and sound. On stage, four dancers — Ilyes Triki, Romane Piffaut, Mohamed Issaoui, Malek Zouaidi — and live musician Marie-Suzanne de Loye (viola da gamba) embody these disappearing and re-emerging landscapes. LABES is a poetic crossing between dance and visual art — a way of giving presence to what has been erased.