NIKA Project Space Opens in Paris with Palestinian artist Mirna Bamieh's 'Sour Things' on Cultural Preservation and Healing

The lawyer turned gallerist Veronika Berezina heads to Paris this September to open the second location of NIKA Project Space at the heart of the young cultural and art district Komunuma. The Parisian branch continues NIKA’s mission of supporting the artistic inquiry of both emerging and established artists and curators, largely from the Global South.

The inaugural show will feature “Sour Things”, an ongoing project by Palestinian artist Mirna Bamieh. Bamieh explores themes of fermentation and preservation as a vehicle for processing grief, displacement, and uprooting. The artist, who founded the Palestine Hosting Society in 2018, uses this live art project to preserve and share Palestinian recipes on the brink of extinction. Her work critically examines the politics of disappearance and memory production, addressing the social and political challenges faced by Palestinian communities today.

According to Bamieh, her work looks intimately at domesticity and then stages it. Using research, she looks deeper into the stories of family kitchens, collects them, creates living archives from them and then creates dinner performances that celebrate food cultures from Palestine that are on the verge of disappearing. She tells art currently, “Sour Things was born, where fermentation and ceramic making come into play, where slowing down, contemplation, reflection, technicality, and craftsmanship takes place, where also, the writing happens. They are different modes of production, happening in between different personalities and bodies that I hold inside me. My story as a Palestinian is as important for me as Mirna the person, yet cannot be separated. My responsibility towards myself as a creator is to give voice to all parts of me, as the individual and as the extended collective that inhabits me and my experience.”

In the Sour Things series, each installation — The Kitchen; The Pantry; The Table; The Staircase; The Wall; The Bed; The Washroom; The Door; The Chair — serves as a fragment of dwelling, a response to the specific political conditions in Palestine, each on display for the first Paris display. These three works look at preservation practices in moments of abruption, trauma, disaster, and grief.

“Sour Things: The Pantry, is my imagination of the emotional space of the pantry of the uprooted and displaced looks like, how can you preserve when you are in a no-place, residing in liminality and in-betweenness. Sour Things: Grieving in seven colors, is a wall installation that looks at grief and the stages of processing loss in citrus ceramic pieces with colors that resonate to the emotional stages of grief. Sour Things: The Staircase, with hanging oversized ceramic sculptures of Okra, Garlic, Chili and clove spice, that are hung like threads like the traditional pre-fridge preservation through dehydration for vegetables.”

Approaching art with sincerity, Bamieh believes, creates a healing space for artists and encourages others to connect with work on a personal level. Similarly, interactive led art projects and community art projects hold significant power in fostering healing spaces for individuals and communities experiencing trauma and displacement.

“I do believe that the power art holds, lies in its ability to open up new ways of seeing and new ways of perception. Art doesn’t answer questions, but offers new modes of questioning and answering. It liberates you from the oppressive weight of the traumatic moment, whether by opening up a space of expression where you break out of the singularity of victimhood, or simply by opening up a space that allows the individual and community to simply take distance, to distract, and that invitation is powerful, and very human, and opens the door to healing.”

In the future, NIKA Project Space and Bamieh are working towards publishing an extensive publication that showcases the complete series of Sour Things.

*“*What I am looking forward to is to develop the rest of the series next year, including Sour Things: The Bed looking at notions of intimacy, sexuality and femininity in the narrow and broad bodily inhabiting experience. Sour Things: The Door that looks at the immigration experience, and Sour Things: the chair that looks at the patriarchal father figure, Sour Things: The Washroom that will be an interactive cleansing healing space. My dream is to end next year, with a show in an industrial, concrete space with no walls, just pillars, where all the parts of Sour Things apartment are finally none fragmented, and this imagined apartment I created in my art practice, comes together.”