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.

The TU-Chemnitz invites you to the opening of the exhibition of the shortlisted projects selected for the new building of the Institute for Chemistry. My project, The Wall of Knowing, was selected and is on display from June 24 until July 7, 2026.

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.

This edition of El Kazma is about humor — not as relief, but as resistance. The exhibition "A Laughing Heart" explores how humor allows us not to look away from what’s happening, but to carry it differently. Humor creates distance from what surrounds and suppresses us — and that distance can open something new.

A Laughing Heart takes laughter seriously. As a way of seeing. As a social force that unsettles the normal and makes room for something else.

At the center of the program is a tribute to Jean Dupuy and Olga Adorno — two artists whose playful, outcome-free approach quietly shaped visual, conceptual, and performance art across the second half of the 20th century.

They didn’t make art that claimed to be taken seriously — and that, as it turned out, was the whole point. It was serious in its lightness. Taking life lightly can be a profound form of resistance. That’s the simple message behind this edition.

Tirailleurs: Trials and Tribulations is an exhibition and research project at Haus der Kulturen der Welt that examines the largely overlooked role of African colonial soldiers—known as Tirailleurs—in the liberation of Europe during the Second World War.

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.

Kula: Cuts, 2023, at the former steam-power plant Chemnitz-Nord: The large-scale painting Kula: Cuts, 2023, will take part in the Begehungen Art Festival 2025 on the site of the decommissioned Nord lignite-fired power plant in Chemnitz. In the midst of this impressive industrial architecture, the 22nd edition of the art festival will take a forward-looking approach to burning issues such as resource consumption, biodiversity and climate change.

Nadia Kaabi-Linke’s installation “All Along the Watchtower” (2012) is featured in the exhibition “From Dawn Till Dusk – The Shadow in Contemporary Art” at Kunstmuseum Bonn. Curated by Prof. Dr. Stephan Berg, the exhibition brings together around 40 international artists and explores the role of the shadow in twentieth- and twenty-first-century art. The show examines the shadow as an image-producing, media-reflexive element, tracing its evolution as a central motif in contemporary art—presented for the first time in this depth in a German museum.

'We Didn’t Know We’re Ready', curated by Silvia Cirelli: Piero Atchugarry Gallery is pleased to announce 'We Didn’t Know We’re Ready' by Tunisian artist Nadia Kaabi-Linke curated by Silvia Cirelli. The expressive journey of Kaabi-Linke delves into the complexities of human nature revealing an “architecture of pain” marked interdependent power dynamics and the struggles of mankind's vulnerability. Her work shows how people are affected by power, memory, and vulnerability. Memory is central to her work — it's the starting point for telling both personal and collective stories. Her artworks act like emotional records, helping us understand hidden parts of our culture today.

'Under Pressure Above Water', Curated by Nilüfer Şaşmazer: The group exhibition Under Pressure Above Water brings together 33 works by 15 artists across various media, including painting, sculpture, and photography, in Arter’s entrance and lower ground floor galleries. Structured around two interrelated sections, the exhibition explores the anxieties provoked by the uncertainties and social injustices of our time, such as environmental disasters, global conflicts, migration, and economic instability. Tracing the impact of challenging social conditions and compounding crises on individuals, it focuses on the questions and propositions that emerge from this context through the expressive possibilities of art.

'Women at Work: Intersection of Fine Art and Craft'. Curated by Wafa Roz: Women at Work: Intersection of Fine Art and Craft is an exploration of the innovative and intricate ways in which contemporary women artists from across the Arab world channel the creative force born at the intersection of fine art and craft. Working across media such as textiles, ceramics, metal, painting, photography, and drawing, these artists engage with materials and technical skills in ways that defy and question the need for boundaries between fine art and craft.

'Homesick for New Things, Traveling for Art', Curated by Barbara J. Scheuermann: In der gegenwärtigen globalisierten Kunstwelt gilt es als Bedingung, dass Künstler:innen sich ihrer privilegierten Position und der damit verbundenen Verantwortung bewusst sind, wenn sie auf Reisen gehen und interkulturelle Begegnungen suchen. Aus diesem Grund werden in der Ausstellung Werke mit Bezug zur Tunis-Reise nicht nur Kunstwerken ihrer Zeit gegenübergestellt, sondern auch Kunstwerken späterer Jahrzehnte, bis hin zur Gegenwart, die teils eigens für die Ausstellung entwickelt wurden. Die Ausstellung möchte so eine Brücke zwischen verschiedenen historischen Phasen schlagen und die anhaltende Relevanz von Kunst als Instrument zur Erforschung von Identität, Geschichte und kultureller Begegnung zeigen.

'As I Lay Between Two Seas' curated by Meriem Berrada, offers a poetic exploration of belonging, identity, and home. Featuring works by twenty-five artists from the Arab world and its diasporas.The works presented each display a different expression of movement–whether physical, temporal, or forced. They resist linear narratives and stereotypical depictions of displacement and migration. Instead, they collectively form a new web of meanings and (hi)stories that add depth and contribute to the broader discussions on migratory movements, rapid urbanization, political upheavals, and the lived realities of exile.

Featuring... is a project that redefines the roles within the art field, shifting the dynamic viewers and artists. During my one-month residency in Tunis, I worked closely with six company employees. This series of performances and installations stems from a profound belief that every human is inherently creative. The distinction between artists and non-artists lies in memory: artists preserve the creativity they discovered in childhood, while others may forget, persuaded by the illusion that they lack talent. My deep conviction led to a journey of remembrance, resulting in stunning works. In this project, the employees became the authors, while I served as their instrument, bringing their dream projects to life — like a brush in the hands of a painter.