Farkhondeh Shahroudi moved from Iran to Germany in 1990 with her son. She works across media, connecting arts, crafts, and poetry, while challenging the separation between tradition and technology. For Echos der Bruderländer, Shahroudi departs from Bozorg Alavi’s Persisch-Deutsch Wörterbuch [Persian-German dictionary] to write poetry that traverses languages, histories, and generations. Writer and literary scholar Bozorg Alavi (1904–1997) emigrated from Tehran to East Berlin in 1953 as a political refugee, founding the Centre for Iranian Studies at the Humboldt University in East Berlin, where he taught modern Persian literature and culture. Alavi’s dictionary was published in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1965 and has been a fundamental resource for the Iranian community in Germany ever since. Shahroudi’s selection of words from Alavi’s dictionary for her own work creates moments for reading and listening, and can be conceived as a poetic transaction that builds bridges between words in different languages from one time and world to another. The textile is understood by the artist as an ‘anti-flag’ fluttering during her opening programme performance and later in the exhibition as an expression of shifting belongings and territories through migration. In doing so, the work defies the nationalist claim of the flag as a symbol that reduces identities to single affiliations. Through these newly commissioned works, Shahroudi connects histories of migration via poems that allude to Alavi’s time in the GDR as well her own more recent path, while also considering the urgencies of today’s context through a feminist lens.

Commissioned by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), co-produced by Farkhondeh Shahroudi and HKW, 2023–24.

Works in the exhibition: Gedichte aus meinem Wörterbuch [Poems from my dictionary] (2024), poetry performance; Auf den Kriegsfeldern, bitte die Blumen nicht zertrampeln [On the battlefields, please do not trample over the flowers] (2024), textile, velvet and applique. Courtesy of the artist

Gedicht aus meinem Wörterbuch, performance by Farkondeh Shahroudi, Friday, 1 March, 19:45