Twenty-five years after the attacks of September 11, the political order built through the “War on Terror” still shapes daily life. Its hard power shows in military occupation and border enforcement, in policing and surveillance, and in the spread of technologies built to classify and track populations. These systems have fallen hardest on Muslim, Arab, Black, brown and migrant communities, inside the borders of the United States and Europe as much as beyond them.
Hard power also produced a visual culture. Images of collapsing towers and falling bodies were followed by embedded journalism, the photographs from Abu Ghraib (first broadcast in April 2004), drone footage, biometric portraits, airport body scans, satellite maps and phone recordings of state violence. Watching and being watched grew hard to tell apart. The screen became one of the places where this order was administered and made ordinary.
The political scientist Joseph Nye formulated “soft power” between the end of one postwar order and the start of another. In Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (1990), and again in Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (2004), Nye separated the ability to attract from the ability to coerce. Military and economic resources could compel people to act; culture, together with political values and foreign policy, could make them want what a state wanted.¹
Soft power therefore appears in the images through which nations and cities present themselves as open and creative while the state itself turns more conservative. It appears in institutional identities and biennial pavilions, and in the constant output of images designed to make a given political and economic order look desirable.
Hard and soft power are interconnected techniques. Surveillance and border control decide who may move and who may gather in public; cultural representation helps to make the system that administers that movement look legitimate. The same geopolitical order that circulates pictures of freedom and cosmopolitan life also decides whose territory can be occupied and whose movement counts as a threat. Culture has never stood outside these relations.
The imbalance shows in where the money goes. Global military spending reached $2.718 trillion in 2024, a rise of 9.4 per cent in real terms on the previous year and the highest figure the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute has ever recorded.² Cultural and social infrastructures, meanwhile, are asked again and again to justify their existence through short-term economic returns and audience numbers. Capitalism centralizes resources while presenting scarcity as inevitable. Vast sums can be found for war and for border technology; the rooms in which people learn, eat together and look after one another are treated as optional. Cultural workers are then asked to make up the shortfall with unpaid labour and permanent competition.
Josh Kline’s New York: Real Estate and the Ruin of American Art traces how this process has changed the conditions under which artists and galleries can exist.³ His argument reaches beyond rent. When land is organized first as a financial asset, cultural production is subordinated to the logic of property; studios and independent spaces, and eventually whole neighbourhoods, become exposed to the same forces that profit from the value they helped to create.
New York is one case of a wider condition. Berlin draws international prestige from its artists, its clubs, its publications and its independent spaces, while the material conditions that sustain them grow more precarious (Watergate, open since 2002, closed on 31 December 2024). Culture produces value for the city, symbolic and financial at once, and the people and spaces producing it are pushed out. This is soft power at the urban scale: the city advertises itself through pictures of creative freedom and treats the infrastructure behind those pictures as expendable.
Nye’s formulation is useful because it names attachment and desire as political forces. It reads them, though, from the standpoint of the state: culture as a way to extend national influence without visible coercion. Over time this reading has tied cultural production more tightly to cultural diplomacy and national branding. Art becomes evidence of national sophistication; the festival becomes a tool of urban promotion.
This recuperation works because culture does produce attachment. It creates languages and memories and forms of belonging; those capacities come out of social life, and they can be captured and made to speak for cities and nations. The relational power already present in cultural practice is extracted from the people who produce it and redirected toward economic and geopolitical ends.
To reopen the question of soft power is to ask who holds the capacities associated with softness (attraction, receptivity, pleasure, trust) and to what ends they are put. Those capacities have never belonged only to states. Feminist, anticolonial, abolitionist and labour movements have long used song and food, schooling and ritual, publishing and assembly to resist displacement and assimilation. They have shown that social change depends on the ability to build relationships and transmit memory as much as on confrontation.
Audre Lorde, in “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” (1978), describes the erotic as a felt source of knowledge and power, one that exposes how little a life organized around obedience and deprivation can offer. bell hooks, in All About Love (2000), treats love as an ethic and lists its ingredients as “care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust.” Silvia Federici’s feminist commons, set out in Re-enchanting the World (2018), begins from the shared practices through which people reproduce life outside the priorities of market and state. These traditions locate power in the capacity to remain in relation, to organize care, to produce knowledge collectively and to make other ways of living imaginable.
This festival proposes to relocate soft power within those social capacities. Softness here is an active method: the ability to receive without possessing, and to hold difference without at once turning it into consensus. It describes forms of power that rest on reciprocity and attention. To relocate soft power is to contest Nye’s vocabulary from within, separating attraction from domination and influence from national interest, and asking whether the capacities that states and markets try to appropriate can be kept and governed by the communities that produce them.
The practices gathered here are human infrastructure, embodied and dependent on time and attention. Digital systems may aspire to monetize them; they cannot replace the social obligations from which they take their meaning. Culture can contest power, and it can also legitimize it. Gathering may or may not create solidarity; memory may or may not produce justice. A festival can create a public, and it can just as easily become another machine for accumulating visibility and prestige.
The exhibition examines how softness has been instrumentalized and asks how its political potential might be reclaimed. It proposes a different relation between the two words: power transformed by the demands of softness. Two questions stay open. What happens when influence is taken back from the ambitions of the state and returned to social life? When will it be possible again to judge culture by the relationships it enables and the conditions it sustains, and no longer by visitor numbers?
These questions require reopening a series of gates that have narrowed over the past decades: between art and public life; between artistic practice and general education; between hospitality and urban infrastructure; between freedom of assembly and the material conditions that let people gather.
The exhibition passes through these gates in nine chapters, each named after a verb: Attending, Gathering, Listening, Remembering, Imagining, Hosting, Ritualizing, Resonating and Becoming. A verb asks for a practice of relation.
The chapters take their departure from Farid ud-Din Attar’s Conference of the Birds (Mantiq ut-Tayr, c. 1177). A community of birds leaves behind what it knows and crosses seven valleys in search of the Simurgh. The thirty birds who survive find that the sovereign they sought cannot be separated from the collectivity they have formed on the way: si murgh, “thirty birds.” The exhibition borrows this logic of passage without turning the valleys into fixed readings of the works. The journey leads toward no single image of power; it asks us to recognize power in the relations that make collective life possible, and to consider how those relations might be defended against capture and disappearance.
Attending
Slavs & Tatars, Havîn Al-Sîndy, Hamid S. Neiriz, Diane Severin Nguyen, Julius Pristauz and Nasanin Dahaghin
Attar’s journey opens in the Valley of the Quest, where the birds give up certainty. The Simurgh itself, rooted in Iranian mythology and carried across Persian, Kurdish and other regional traditions, is a figure for a culture sustained by movement. Slavs & Tatars work in the same passages among languages and beliefs, across territories shaped by the Soviet project and by older regional histories. Their Simurgh proposes a regionalism made through translation, and it takes issue with the maps and museums that sort cultures into centre and margin.
Hamid S. Neiriz scrapes back layers of paint in Ausgrabungen (Excavations) to expose the images beneath; recovery changes what it uncovers, and the archaeology is psychic as much as material. Havîn Al-Sîndy’s Gûrçikê min (2025) brings geopolitics into the body: three motorized clay organs appear to breathe, tying vulnerable flesh to the routes of migration and organ trafficking. The kidneys work as archives of medicine and of the border.
Diane Severin Nguyen’s Spring Snow (2024) invokes Trịnh Thị Ngọ, the Radio Hanoi announcer American soldiers called “Hanoi Hannah,” whose broadcasts between 1965 and 1973 addressed them through sympathy and homesickness. Nguyen’s jungle and artificial snow, her costumed bodies and broken language, show how thin the line between persuasion and intimacy can be. Pogolina (2026), by Julius Pristauz and Nasanin Dahaghin, combines AI-generated text and recordings into something between a concert and a sound installation; its camp handling of authenticity tests what a voice can claim as lived.
Gathering
Akshita Garud (Two Odd), Caique Tizzi, Céline Semaan, Eloa and Jårg Geismar
Gathering builds social infrastructure, and its politics depend on who convenes and who does the work. Museums assemble imperial collections; platforms convert relations into data. Festivals and shared tables can project openness while hiding unequal access and extracted labour. The question is under what conditions gathering becomes a shared capacity.
Akshita Garud’s work with Two Odd treats food as embodied geography. Ingredients and recipes carry displacement into the intimacy of a meal, and by insisting on heat and regional variation she refuses the flattening of cuisines into consumable images of diversity. Caique Tizzi’s Table as Stage, made with Fortuna Forest, rustcakes, Ada’s Deli and Adam Fearon, likewise puts knowledge in the acts of serving and eating. The table hands out roles (host and guest, server and served) and tests whether its relations outlast the event.
Céline Semaan’s A Woman Is a School joins storytelling and textiles with film and political education; the school exists wherever knowledge circulates without being cut off from the struggles that formed it. Jårg Geismar’s restaurant mes amis stages artistic and culinary encounters in which references travel across languages and objects while keeping the unequal histories of that travel. Eloa works with light, a material that gathers bodies without enclosing them and that also decides what becomes visible.
Attar’s Valley of Love frames gathering as exposure. Love loosens calculation and possession; a shared journey changes its participants without erasing their differences. A gathering with political consequences stays unfinished: it lets encounters redirect the movement, and it forms belonging outside state administration and market exchange.
Listening
Elena Carvajal, Enis Maci, Ian Waelder, Mariuccia Secol, Mehdi Behbudi
Listening begins when certainty loosens, and contemporary attention arrives already sorted and monetized. Enis Maci’s video installation Gentle Lands confronts Peter Thiel’s fantasy of changing the world “unilaterally.” It moves from Silicon Valley through post-9/11 politics to Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt, following the alliance between technological wealth and authoritarian thought. When those able to shape reality no longer need to persuade, listening becomes a political limit.
Elena Carvajal gives abstraction its own tempo; paint behaves before it signifies, and the viewer has to receive material relations without forcing them into representation. Ian Waelder works with residue. His photographs and sculptures bring archival histories, family biography and discarded objects into installations completed by the visitor; what has outlived its use can still carry history.
Mariuccia Secol turns to the labour excluded from art’s official economy: domestic and reproductive work, care, the time that sustains production. Her Unraveling drawings make duration tangible through repetition and slow shifts of colour. Mehdi Behbudi treats sound as a physical event shaped by architecture. Resonant objects and custom-built instruments, oscillators and acoustic systems, join composition to physics and electronics; he extends experimental traditions under the conditions in which music is still made in Tehran.
Remembering
Anousha Payne with Ushara, Kitty Doherty, Elif Saydam
Memory is a process altered by every recall. Triangle reshapes the O of my mouth, by Anousha Payne, Ushara and Kitty Doherty, begins with a house and a moth moving between shelter and confinement. Payne’s wax circles record repeated movement; her batik ties domestic and intergenerational knowledge in Sri Lanka to colonial histories of exchange and appropriation.
Ushara turns that material memory into voice. A pipe organ, a cello and field recordings accompany a four-act opera that reworks J. S. Bach and Hildegard von Bingen alongside her own compositions; trained and experimental vocal forms carry womanhood and trauma, solitude and transformation, without separating history from the body that sounds it. Doherty’s concrete poetry makes language equally physical. The title reshapes the speaking mouth and exposes words as inherited structures that regulate which sounds and which speakers are recognized; altering a word also changes where it may be spoken.
Elif Saydam’s paintings pull ornament and illuminated manuscripts into petrol stations and apartment blocks under gentrification pressure. Her new works develop from a historical misreading: silver and gold that once depicted water have darkened over centuries, and the represented landscape has changed with them. The material change makes recognition contingent and lets small details carry social history.
Attar’s Valley of Ignorance names the collapse of categories inadequate to experience. Memory may distort, and the distortion can disclose the conditions under which the past becomes legible.
Hosting
Berni Searle, Mariana Castillo Deball, Daniel Butcher, Maria Portilla, Wenxin Zheng
Hospitality sets up a provisional order of belonging: it admits and it excludes. The works here find that order in bodies and rooms marked by migration and colonial history.
In Profile (2002), Berni Searle presses a cross, the British crown, a souvenir spoon, an anti-riot shield, a Zulu love letter, an Arabic prayer and cloves into her cheeks. Translucent photographs keep these impressions on brown skin; identity becomes a record of contact with religion and trade, with affection and with state violence. Mariana Castillo Deball’s Forbidden Symmetries (2017) uses forty-five concrete paving stones from Berlin-Wedding, laid out according to Roger Penrose’s non-repeating tiles and cast with hand-drawn engravings. The pattern cannot settle into repetition, and the pavement loses its apparent neutrality.
Daniel Butcher’s paintings assemble ancient imagery and speculative futures; their torn, layered origins persist in figurative worlds that are recognizable without belonging to a stable time. [Author to supply one or two sentences on Maria Portilla’s work; the source text describes nothing.] Wenxin Zheng transfers WeChat messages, travel photographs and selfies onto canvas. Images made for fast circulation become a slower archive of contemporary Chinese social life, in which inherited traditions and global media coexist.
Attar’s Valley of Doubt makes hospitality’s risk plain: a host cannot fully determine what a guest, or a cultural form, will bring. Hosting concerns the material arrangements through which something can enter and remain. The question here is how those arrangements might make a world inhabitable without mastering what they receive.
Ritualizing
Alanna Lawley, Dan Lie, Forough Alaei, Tawna
Alanna Lawley’s drawings approach matrilineal trauma through bodies that turn themselves inside out. Their appeal to female lineage and “natural wisdoms” also runs up against a wellness economy that sells embodied knowledge back as private self-repair. Dan Lie’s Secret Grieving Society moves grief into transforming matter: hemp associated with Korean mourning, ceramics, branches and ropes, altered by dye and sunlight, by decay and reuse. Its finite lifespan lets loss act in the present without pretending to preserve it intact.
Forough Alaei photographs women in Iran repeating gestures that widen a restricted social field: entering prohibited spaces, dressing as they choose, dancing in public. Her “small seedlings” draw their political force from persistence. Tawna, an anticolonial collective of Sápara, Kichwa and mestizo artists in the Ecuadorian Amazon, carries repetition into territory. Its films draw on myths and dreams and embodied resistance while keeping narrative authority with the communities and lands it comes from; the forest takes part in knowledge, and memory is continuously re-authored.
Attar’s Valley of Loneliness describes experience cut off from the relations able to carry it: privatized knowledge, individualized grief, isolated resistance, land reduced to resource. Ritual works against this severance by making passages between bodies and generations, between objects and territories. These works show continuity being revised and materially borne. Soft power, on this reading, shifts from circulating influence to sustaining the relations on which collective life depends.
Resonating
SoiL Thornton, Katja Pilipenko, Kalpesh Lathigra, Hashem Shakeri, Susana AbdulMajid
Resonance begins when relations travel through effects that exceed their source. SoiL Thornton’s Almost anything can be imagined, whatever you want, so imagine that, but not all can be painted and that’s, well… (2021) takes on the systems that classify bodies and objects. Neon green stands for a screen awaiting substitution; gendered colours and dress codes turn out to be conventions repeated until they look like preference.
Katja Pilipenko’s In Search of Lost Security (2022) sets continuous transcripts from Russian Channel One and the German Tagesschau, recorded in the weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, on six suspended aluminium plates. Viewers walk between competing narratives joined by the recurring word “security”; political communication becomes an environment whose urgency leaves no room for distance.
Kalpesh Lathigra negotiates visibility through long relationships with the communities he photographs. In The Lives We Dream In Passing (2026) he sees New Delhi through a taxi driver’s rear-view mirror, placing the image inside the encounter that produced it. Hashem Shakeri’s The Kahur Does Not Fall Unless the Earth Wills It (2018–ongoing) connects drought and repression in Balochistan. A scanning glitch bathes a man standing in a kahur tree in red; the accident binds ecological endurance to the Women, Life, Freedom uprising of autumn 2022.
Susana AbdulMajid’s work across theatre and organizing gives transmission a social setting. With Anahita Sadighi she runs Poetry Nights Berlin, which brings Arabic and Persian poetry and music into one shared room. Resonance stays ambivalent: the infrastructures that carry memory can also distribute propaganda, and an image can produce recognition or a stereotype.
Becoming
Simon Speiser, Zeynep Boyan, Dieter Detzner, Anahita Sadighi
Becoming asks what culture can do as a form of dynamic sociality. Categories such as citizen and migrant, artist and worker, identify people by administration; cultural practice may reproduce them or unsettle them.
Simon Speiser’s Cuerdas del Manglar (Strings from the Mangrove) continues his speculative documentary Naufragio Liberador (2024), which considers the shipwrecks behind the maroon communities of Esmeraldas, Ecuador. String theory and black holes connect disappearance to emergence, while scratch holograms engraved in metal recall Afro-Ecuadorian memory and the region’s gold mining. Physics and colonial history, technology and ancestral practice, meet without collapsing into one system; cultural survival appears as the production of forms out of rupture.
Zeynep Boyan’s hand-built stoneware records pressure and support. Its negotiation of mass and void offers a model for relations that last through adjustment: gatherings and languages endure by changing. Dieter Detzner turns the question toward architecture, where structures gather uses beyond their original function. Studios, schools, theatres, restaurants, clubs, streets and homes are culture’s material conditions; their disappearance removes a capacity to assemble.
Anahita Sadighi’s work as gallerist and curator creates encounters between ancient and contemporary art, and between Persian and Arab histories. It brings forward the usually unseen labour that lets languages and publics meet. The amphorae she brings into the halls come from the Kashan region of central Persia. These antique vessels were used for storing and transporting dairy products, hence their bulbous bodies and narrow necks; their glaze colours and techniques belong to a Kashan tradition that reaches back through the Arsacid era (3rd century BCE to 3rd century CE) to the Elamite and Babylonian periods (2000–1000 BCE). The archaic form documents centuries of Persian ceramic craft and joins practical function to historical heritage.
The exhibition thus moves influence away from the state’s desired image and into the conditions in which people encounter one another and imagine themselves. Cities and institutions cannot credibly celebrate openness while displacing cultural workers and shutting out the communities they claim to represent. Soft Power Festival makes this assertion while everything around it moves fast through the raging networks of global fascism.
Notes
- Joseph S. Nye Jr., Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (Basic Books, 1990); Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (PublicAffairs, 2004).
- Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, “Trends in World Military Expenditure, 2024,” SIPRI Fact Sheet, April 2025.
- Josh Kline, New York: Real Estate and the Ruin of American Art, and related writings and exhibitions on real-estate speculation, cultural production and the land, property, labour and capital on which it depends.
- Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” (1978), in Sister Outsider (Crossing Press, 1984); bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (William Morrow, 2000); Silvia Federici, Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (PM Press, 2018).