Image: Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, GfZK Leipzig
Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig (GfZK) is presenting the second episode of its group exhibition ‘It’s not about nothing’ from 4 July to 18 October 2026 at GfZK Neubau. The exhibition brings together works by Maryam Jafri and Pınar Öğrenci/Nuri Musluoğlu, alongside diploma presentations by Merlin Rainer and Pooya Sedighi Mournani. Its focus is on image archives as sites of resistance and as ways of approaching suppressed or “buried” histories.
‘It’s not about nothing’ is structured across two episodes and both of GfZK’s exhibition buildings. The first episode, at GfZK Altbau, runs from 22 May 2026 to 27 June 2027 and draws on works from the institution’s collection, invited artistic positions and a loan from Clemens von Wedemeyer. Together, the two episodes examine documentary artistic practices and ask how photographic and filmic images make social and political realities perceptible, as well as how images participate in producing the realities they depict.
Episode 2 uses found photographs, film footage, and analogue and digital archives as starting points for investigations into struggles for freedom and exile, identity and subculture. The artists employ different strategies for working with image-based media, including montage as a narrative device. The subjects referenced by the exhibition include independence days in countries across Asia, Africa and the Middle East, migrant struggles in West Germany during the 1980s, the revolutions in Iran, and the Hardtekk scene in eastern Germany.
Jafri’s series ‘Independence Day 1934–1975’, made between 2009 and 2019, addresses official images and historical narratives surrounding national independence. Öğrenci presents the film ‘Kein Change (Zero Change)’ and the collage ‘Big Day’, both connected to the archive of Nuri Musluoğlu. After arriving in Heilbronn in 1965 as the son of a Turkish migrant worker, Musluoğlu documented migrant workers’ protests against low wages and racism during the 1980s through photographs, Super 8 films and audio recordings. Öğrenci’s engagement with this material also considers the persistence of racially motivated violence in Germany and her own experience of migration. Born in Van, Turkey, in 1973, the artist lives in Berlin and works on displacement, migration, survival and resistance from decolonial and feminist perspectives.
Mournani’s presentations include ‘Untimely’ and ‘To my mother’. His work draws on images of significant events in Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, using material from state sources, the internet and social media. He isolates details and image fragments, transferring them by laser printing onto surfaces including aluminium and glass. The resulting speculative archive does not claim completeness or truth; instead, it questions how images are framed, who produces them and when documentary imagery can function as an instrument of resistance. A separate series consists of portraits of the artist’s mother, photographed during visits to Iran, where she is described as both a close companion and a witness to history.
The exhibition was curated by Franciska Zólyom with Sabine Weier and Hanar Hupka. It opened at GfZK Neubau on 3 July at 5pm, with free admission. An artist talk with Öğrenci and Hupka, held in English, is scheduled for 26 September at 3pm, with admission included in the exhibition ticket. A second conversation, with Mournani and Hupka, will take place on 8 October at 6pm and is free of charge. GfZK Leipzig is located at Karl-Tauchnitz-Strasse 9–11 and is open Tuesday to Friday from 2pm to 7pm, and on weekends and public holidays from noon to 6pm.
