Traces of Us: Neo-Archives and Preservations

Exploration of alternative methods of archiving that resist normativity and center queer presence. These traces, both hidden and visible, become portals — gestures of love, acts of remembrance, and storytelling experiments.

January - April 2025

Alternative photography and printmaking

In an exploration of memory’s fragile yet persistent nature, Kurban asks how traces of the past are preserved, transformed, and reimagined through photography, photogrammetry, scanning, and alternative archiving methods. Centered around queer bodies and overlooked narratives in the Middle East, these works resist erasure by rethinking how history is recorded, fragmented, and reconstructed. They propose that memory is not fixed but alive — unstable, sensitive, and deeply rooted in material and cultural textures.

Traces of Us, Project Book, April 2025.

Sacred Traces: Street Shrines of Lebanon

In Sacred Traces, Kurban turns to urban spaces as ephemeral archives. Documenting spontaneous acts of mourning and remembrance in the city’s fabric — candles, flowers, pictures, altars — these photographs reveal quiet acts of resilience and spiritual continuity. By framing these transient memorials, the work honors unofficial histories, asserting that public spaces are charged with personal and collective memory, however fleeting.

Memorabilia Reimagined

Through Memorabilia Reimagined, intimate personal objects are flattened into luminous digital images, transforming heirlooms and keepsakes into contemporary relics. This process questions how memory exists beyond the physical, asking what is preserved when an object is severed from its material weight. These scans meditate on belonging, lineage, and loss, offering a new visual language for the archiving of private histories.

PANEO BARROCO

Challenging the fixed nature of photographic representation, PANEO BARROCO experiments with photogrammetry, a three-dimensional mapping tool, to capture bodies in motion. Here, memory is not static but shifting — a body that evades categorization, a presence that refuses to be neatly contained. In resisting rigid documentation, the work suggests new ways of witnessing existence: fragmented, shifting, vibrant.

Project made in collaboration with Emmanuel Cohen, in the framework of Kurban’s work as assistant researcher for Critical Bodies Lab.

Love Beyond Borders

The Love Beyond Borders postcards expand this inquiry into experimental archiving through alternative printmaking techniques. Using cyanotype, layered texts, and photography of textures, Kurban creates direct recordings of traces — where writing and image merge, distort, and resurface. Inspired by non-Eurocentric traditions of memory-keeping, these postcards act as tactile, blue-tinted maps of queer presence moving through time and space, honoring those who came before.