Project and images by Jiyan Céline Schmidiger
«I Kiss You Today For Tomorrow» explores local culture and heritage through the lens of collective memory in Northern Kurdistan. Decades of forced assimilation have led to fragmented identities and erased histories. Drawing from experiences across generations, the project blends personal testimonies with speculative elements, dissolving boundaries between fiction and non-fiction.
Here, the personal becomes political, and the spiritual intertwines with the historical. Through storytelling shaped by political constraints, the work bridges the intimate and the universal. While rooted in Kurdish experiences, its questions of memory, belonging, erasure, and resilience resonate across diverse identities. It reflects diasporic realities and intergenerational dynamics, recognising that understanding often emerges from absence.
Rather than serving as a retrospective of historical events, the project pays tribute to Kurdish resistance and resilience — an acknowledgment of an ongoing lived reality, while examining the silences that persist. Moving back and forth in time, it weaves together documentary images, staged scenes, and archival references. Landscapes in Istanbul, Zurich, and Mesopotamia become spaces where familial stories and imagination intertwine, reflecting broader cultural and political dynamics and asking how past experiences are carried, silenced, or transformed in diaspora. Identity remains fluid — shaped by forced migration, intergenerational trauma, and hybrid belonging — while home shifts between memory and myth, between known realities and imagined possibilities.
While rooted in a Kurdish perspective, its concerns extend beyond it, asking what it means to remember, to belong, to carry what was silenced, and to honour the resilience carried within it.
In the exhibition «Poetics Of Deconstruction: I Kiss You Today For Tomorrow and Our Gaze Is Not Yours To Claim», Jiyan Céline Schmidiger and nedia boutouchent present works, whose practices engage with the cultural heritage of Kurdistan and the colonial male gaze.
Kornhausforum, Bern
Opening (Vernissage): Thu., 23 April, 6:30 pm
Exhibition runs until 15 August
www.kornhausforum.ch
Mentorings: Salvatore Vitale, Wolfgang Brückle, Ann-Christin Bertrand,
Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts
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15. April 2026
