CCA Berlin is pleased to present THE ECHO OF PROTEST IS DISTANT TO THE PROTEST by Nazanin Noori, marking the first solo exhibition by the Berlin-based multidisciplinary artist. With a background in theater, film and experimental music, Noori often merges sound, space, sculpture, and post-dramatic poetry to create atmospheric narratives, traversing the genres of ambient hardcore and doom electronics. The exhibition at an off-site location of CCA Berlin—Kranzler X—features a newly produced immersive installation that delves into the emotional (im)mobilization of the public and the spectatorship of suffering in the context of political protest. 

THE ECHO OF PROTEST IS DISTANT TO THE PROTEST is an assemblage where sound, sculpture, and text coalesce into a theatrical mise en scène—empty of actors, yet brimming with poignancy, dark humor, and raw emotion. It dramatizes the digital dissemination of political protests and their multilayered psychic aftermath. At a time when global revolutions and upheavals are reduced to bite-sized reels and televised fragments of suffering and hope, the visceral reality of an elsewhere protest collapses into virtual spectacles, engendering a sense of detachment and numbness. By appropriating classical dramaturgical devices such as kitsch, irony and exaggeration, Noori reflects on her personal, diasporic experience of witnessing political events from afar—an experience marked by voyeurism, paralysis, turmoil, and longing. For the artist, these feelings first emerged during the Jina Amini protests against the Islamic Republic of Iran, but once condensed into a climate of affects, they become relational, even transposable to other contexts. The echo of uproar in the wake of each resistance movement may traverse vast geographical distances, but the echo itself is only a ghost image, a traumatized ruin, an abstraction of collective political desires severed from the lived experiences of the struggle for self-determination and emancipation. The exhibition stands as both a monument to this irreparable severance and an echo chamber. It urges us to listen with care, to look for what is left of us, once empathy is exhausted, and life goes on. 

The synth soundscape (quadraphonic sound, 30 min) is a transcription of the emotions that arise in the context of demonstration. By deliberately avoiding the use of samples or recordings, Noori has created an abstract simulation of the infinite sonorities, rhythms, noises, clashes, and chants that constitute the psychoacoustic reality of political protest. The soundscape is composed of a multitude of indiscrete layers; it demands a kind of deep dive—plunging headlong into its intense oceanic totality, much like losing oneself in the midst of a protest. Still, as Noori insists, what we hear is only a synthetic abstraction, a distorted echo constantly fleeing from its source. 

Three airport rollway signs in bright yellow and red carry words from a poetic fragment that has appeared repeatedly in Noori’s past projects—in her writing, performance, and singing for many years. The signs appear to be a parody of guidance, warning, headlines, and protest slogans. At the same time, they are also a self-parody of the artist, who desires to take part in the struggle, but is rendered powerless by a privileged distance to it. The fragmentation of the poem prompts unexpected ways of reading, and produces ambivalent meanings that are both ironic and tragic. At the height of political turmoil, how can any word serve as a beacon to guide displaced people home?

بیزارم holds multiple meanings in Farsi: “I’m tired,” “I’m fed up,” “I hate.” This phrase—another leitmotif in Noori’s oeuvre—is transformed into a black acrylic object, hovering in the white-walled staircase like a ghost. The mute feelings of exhaustion and hopelessness of the anonymous masses enter the stage. Their fatigue acquires a body, like a stranger’s body you pass by without seeing. These encumbered words project themselves into the void like a choked-up, drowned-out cry, waiting for an impossible response to remedy the hurt.

Outside on the streets, a second word sculpture answers from a distant location. Noori‘s window installation THE PARTY OF GOD, WELL DID WE LIVE at the restaurant Nobelhart & Schmutzig on Friedrichstr. is conceived as an extension of CCA Berlin’s exhibition, an echo to THE ECHO. There, معذرت, the Farsi phrase for “I’m sorry,” appears in bright yellow acrylics, backdropped by green curtains. It is a radical redesign of the green-on-yellow Hezbollah flag, presenting a hysterical, unbearable scenario where those in power would offer an apology—ruling under a flag that acknowledges past wrongdoings—and a promise to do right by the people. How ironic that political justice is a heightened fantasy for some, while remaining self-evident for others. How can we distance ourselves from echoing a kind of hope that is simultaneously a weapon and an illusion?

Curators: Fabian Schöneich with Nan Xi
Production: Franz Hempel