Stones Remember Fire
Varun Kumar, Sans titre, 2026. Sculpture. Objets trouvés (bois, nids abandonnés, plastique, tissu).
It all started from a well-established presence in Geneva’s cultural landscape. For several years, Alexandra Sheherazade Salem’s brother has been organizing annual events around Nowruz at L’Usine — nights with musicians and DJs that have become a recurring fixture of this festive period. The idea grew to expand this programming further: to integrate a collective exhibition at Espace Forde, screenings at Cinéma Spoutnik, and let the celebration spill over into other forms. This is how the two artists and curators Xheneta Imeri and Alexandra Sheherazade Salem conceived Stones Remember Fire.
But Nowruz is only a starting point here — or rather, a key. What the two curators wanted to capture is not so much the celebration itself as what it carries: Nowruz, which literally means « new day, » marks the return of spring, an invocation of light and regeneration. From this symbolism, Xheneta Imeri and Alexandra Sheherazade Salem drew a thread to open up a much broader reflection — on memory, cycles, the relationship between the visible and the invisible, and the way we inhabit what surrounds us. The title itself says something essential: stones hold warmth long after the fire has gone out. The trace persists. That is what this is about.
The curatorial approach is worth dwelling on, as it reveals something about a certain way of making art today. Xheneta Imeri and Alexandra Sheherazade Salem did not assemble their selection through an open call or cold institutional logic. The invited artists are acquaintances from shared studies, chance encounters, quiet companionships — most of them based in Switzerland. This choice of proximity is not a retreat inward: it is a way of ensuring the coherence of the dialogue, of bringing together practices whose depth is known and with which genuine conversation is possible. And that conversation proved fertile: many of the artists chose to produce entirely new works for the occasion, giving the exhibition a particular freshness and tension. Existing works are not simply hung on walls here — something is brought into being, specifically for this place, this moment, this question.
Zahra Hakim, From the Lemon Blossom a Lemon Blossom Is Reborn, 2026. Installation. Mirrors, plants, tape. Photo : Jacques Magnol.
What runs through the whole, despite the diversity of mediums and trajectories, is a shared attention to the fragment and to what endures. Grief, displacement, identity in motion, gestures of care and reconstruction — threads that connect the works without homogenizing them. Some pieces also resonate, in more subterranean ways, with painful contemporary realities: the destruction of heritage, exile, war. The curators do not impose these themes as direct axes — they let the works speak, and the echoes come of themselves.
Zahra Hakim intervenes on the very windows of the exhibition space with adhesive tape recalling the protection of glass in wartime — that urgent, banal and poignant gesture made when one fears an explosion might shatter everything. Here, however, these strips are reworked in a colourful, almost childlike palette, transforming the trace of fear into something soft and alive. Born in Iraq, having lived in Iran before settling in Geneva, Zahra Hakim embodies in this minimal gesture the full idea of the journey — lives built across several places, several languages, several versions of oneself.
Varun Kumar starts from walking and observation, collecting found elements from disturbed zones — where trees have been felled, where the ground is strewn with plastics and mixed natural and industrial debris. He brings these disparate fragments together into carefully arranged compositions, as if in an act of silent reconstruction: what was abandoned, scattered, apparently worthless suddenly finds coherence, a way of « being together. » There is in this approach something at once deeply political and deeply tender.
Sima Nacimi, It Was a Dream, It Was a Nightmare, 2026. Ceramic. Photo : Jacques Magnol.
Sima Nacimi steps outside her usual pictorial practice to turn to ceramics. She has modelled around thirty small figures she calls « babies » — fragile and strange forms, born from an emotional context marked by grief and anxiety. Ceramics, with its malleable material hardened by fire, becomes here a medium of transformation: what was painful takes shape, becomes tangible, and in that passage something is released. Creation as a traversal of grief, as regeneration.
Azadbek Bekchanov, Slow of Faith (Inflorescence), 2026. Oil pastel on paper.
Azadbek Bekchanov, originally from Uzbekistan and based in Romania, never draws on a blank page. He works on already printed pages, inhabited by texts and stories that are at once close and foreign to him — a language he does not fully master, a culture he observes from a certain distance. Onto these pages he adds layers of symbols, colours, and forms assembled intuitively. The result is a visual dialogue with what pre-exists, a way of inscribing oneself in a history without claiming to be at its centre.
Marta Magnetti offers a sound piece that occupies and transforms the space. She began with a lullaby passed down by her mother — a song that was originally a collective chant to accompany the dead in the mountains, which over time became an evening song for children. Magnetti stripped it of its words to retain only the bare, floating melody, somewhere between the funereal and the tender. By stepping outside language, she touches something universal in transmission: what passes from body to body, from generation to generation, without necessarily being sayable.
Houria Mosbah, based in Algiers, presents a video drawing on her family archives. The death of her father is the pivotal moment: on one side, a rupture with the paternal family; on the other, a rediscovered and strengthened bond with the maternal family. The event of mourning redistributes belongings and redraws the contours of identity. The video follows this interior movement with a delicacy that rings true.
Stones Remember Fire bears witness to a young, diverse and vibrant Geneva scene. And it is not incidental that two women have traced its contours: the gradual feminisation of exhibition curating brings with it a curatorial sensibility that favours listening, relationship and affect — qualities that permeate every room here, and make this exhibition far more than a sum of juxtaposed works.
Stones Remember Fire
Two Artists and a Collective Exhibition
Forde
Rue de la Coulouvrenière 11, 2e étage,
Genève.
