Gail Foley: Montgomery Ward

“My aunts, the twins, two butches, Carole, Lou, Cherry Street, yellow honey wax, softball summer league, too many drinks on a shag carpet, mirrors, flash and light, birthdays, vacations, Chris and Disney World in Orlando, my copy, your copy, the photo developer at Montgomery Ward, yellow envelopes, yellow honey wax, scratched negatives stuck to the bottom of a water damaged cardboard box, pictures still hanging from a magnet on your fridge, cigars, The High Life, sharp collars, denim jeans, polo t-shirt on the capitol steps, no-homo very-homo, yellow honey wax, a nun who then became a lesbian, bus tickets to the baseball hall of fame in Cooperstown New York, Aunt Barb’s dog on the kitchen table, that laugh, those grass fields, the Carriage Room and the last time you got to dance on that counter, costumes, drag, the same high school gymnasium, an inside joke, yellow honey wax, and just enough to let the light in.”

— the artist

Gail Foley’s series Montgomery Ward started by going through hundreds of photos from their aunt Carole’s personal photo collection. Carole had recently passed and the artist’s mother inherited boxes filled with negatives and photographs kept in yellow envelopes typical for the department store Montgomery Ward, where they all got developed. To preserve the memories which were mainly produced between the 1950s and late 1990s, the artist started digitizing them. Foley was struck by what the photos revealed about the complicated nature of her aunt’s life, who she was and could have been.

As the daughter of Catholic Italian immigrants, Carole grew up in the small, rural city of Rutland, Vermont. She rarely left the city, worked in an attendance office in a Catholic School and was part of a women’s softball team. For most of her life, she lived with her twin sister Lucy in their family home. She never officially had a partner or lived with a man, but later her so-called best friend Chris moved in with her. Even though she never came out, most people around her knew that Chris was Carole’s partner.

Deeply interested in exploring the construction of queer identities through archival material in their work, Foley selected photos that capture queer instances in their hometown Rutland, focusing on moments that seem candid and joyous. To use them in their work, it was integral to Foley to obscure the images‘ vividness as a node to the complexities of understanding the history of queerness and lesbian lineage. They reprinted the images and covered them in yellow beeswax, turning the frozen moments into fragile fossils. To see them most clearly, they must be destroyed.

Gail Foley (b. 1998 in Rutland, USA) is a visual artist and writer, currently based in Los Angeles. Foley is presently an MFA candidate at the California Institute of the Arts. In 2026, they were part of the exhibition Peripheries and Centers in the framework of Jahresausstellung HFBK in Hamburg, Germany, and exhibited their work at multiple art spaces in Los Angeles and New York before. Alongside their artistic and academic work, Foley is an active arts organizer and has recently curated Apt 206, a group exhibition of emerging MFA candidates from CalArts and UCLA during Frieze Los Angeles.

Sarah Ama Duah: Black and White makes Grey

For eight years, the five boxes containing the belongings of Sarah Ama Duah’s late father, Mr. Abu Saeed Duah, remained in her possession before she decided to work with the material. Among them were the elegant suits her father used to wear, as well as binders filled with documents and official correspondence that testified to the many bureaucratic hurdles he had to overcome throughout his life. Having translated many of those letters — written in a bureaucratic German that even she, as a native speaker, frequently struggled to understand — the artist was already thoroughly familiar with them.

Duah’s father was born in Kumasi, Ghana, in 1961 and, driven by his family’s financial hardship, set out for Germany in 1986. Initially facing deportation, he eventually found work and was granted a tolerated status. He lived in Germany for over 30 years, was married twice and had two children. During a visit in Ghana, he lost his passport with the stamp that secured his right to permanent residence in Germany. The German embassy did not issue him a replacement. Mr. Abu Saeed Duah passed away in Kumasi in 2018.
Sarah Ama Duah’s installation Black and White makes Grey takes the material traces of her father’s lifelong struggles with bureaucracy as a starting point and seeks to situate his experiences within a broader historical framework, examining the social, political, and institutional conditions that shaped them. Spread in space, one finds motives from his estate: a suit like he used to wear, a plaster cast of one of his shoes, a selection of his personal documents and a larger-than-life sculpture of his head, which the artist had commissioned from sculptor Nicholas Ofori in Ghana based on a photograph.

Critically engaged with modes of sculptural appreciation in her work, the artist combines those items with deconstructed and appropriated architectural elements, materials and objects associated with European high culture, authority and holiness: the suit and the shoe are arranged on fragments of a three-parted Corinthian column, the documents are transferred onto marble, and the sculpture of her father’s head is held by a putti adorned vase that stands on a wooden replica of the holy Golden Stool from the Ashanti region, where Duah’s father is from. Along with the flood of empty envelopes, the installation is completed by a standard filing cabinet, still commonly found in German government offices, whose medium-grey color sets the tonal register for the work. As if chiseled off a scaled-down equestrian statue, the hanging head of a horse peeks out from the open drawer amid spilling cocoa fruits. As an ensemble the single parts of the installation form a hybrid of a monument and a memorial that reflects on the inhuman bureaucratic structures immigrants have to face and honors the individuals that have to suffer from it.

Sarah Ama Duah (b. 1989 in Bremen, Germany) studied Fine Arts at the Universität der Künste Berlin in the class of Jimmy Robert and completed her studies in 2026. Prior to this, she earned both a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree in Fashion Design at the HAW Hamburg. Her work has been presented at Humboldt Forum, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Triennale Kleinplastik Fellbach, Performing Arts Festival Berlin at HAU 3, as well as internationally at the SCCA Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art in Ghana. In 2025, Duah was awarded first prize in the Wolfram Beck Sculpture Award.

Ana Korkia: In Case I Return

Ana Korkia‘s engagement with self-produced and collected archival material, together with footage from her family, has developed organically over the past years. As part of her painting process she collected and produced photos, drawings and notes and kept them as big collages on her studio walls. Dealing with the socio-political situation in her home country Georgia in her work, the assembled material always related to recent political movements (like the big protests in 2023 and 2024 reacting to the „foreign agents law“) and her own family history, which is deeply influenced by the last two wars in the country (1992-93, 2008), resulting in flight and displacement. In the past years Ana’s research mainly resulted in large-scale oil paintings of the Caucasus mountain region which functions as a protective shield against a Russian invasion.

During the COVID pandemic Korkia spent a lot of time in Georgia with her family and repeatedly visited the ruin of the Menji Sanatorium in Senaki close to her grandmother‘s home. She started to study the place which continuously played a role in her life since she was a little girl, first as a playground, then as a mythical place of horror. She took photos, collected broken off ornaments, drew plants growing there and wrote down her memories in her diary. Over time, the site revealed more complex layers of meaning connected to abandonment, collapse, mourning, and historical transition. The Menji Sanatorium is located close to the contested region of Abkhazia, which the artist’s family is from and played the central role in the mentioned two last wars. The sanatorium got abandoned after the war in the 1990s and people used bricks from it to rebuild their lost or destroyed homes.

Integrating photos from her family photo albums, Korkia’s installation In Case I Return brings together the material traces of her research on Menji Sanatorium and materializes the attempt to memorize and patch together chunks of the past to understand the own family history and the historical events that shaped it. The arrangement of these fragments is inspired by the improvised living spaces in which Korkia grew up. Following the Russian occupation of Abkhazia, her family and many others were forced to move into abandoned public buildings such as sanatoriums, hospitals, and schools. Korkia grew up in a former school in Tbilisi where classrooms were used as living spaces. With no separating walls, families like hers built temporary partitions from found wood to create some privacy. Often covered with carpets and beige linen, these structures were constantly adapted and personalized with family photos, calendars, textiles, and handmade decorative objects. Transferred to the exhibition space, it gives the structure for a spatial system of remembering.

Ana Korkia (b. 2003 in Tbilisi, Georgia) is an artist based in Düsseldorf, Germany, working across painting, ceramics, drawing, and installation. Korkia’s artistic practice engages with questions of displacement, inherited memory, and material fragility. She started her degree in visual arts in Tbilisi, at Free University of Georgia (VAADS), currently studying at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in the class of Ellen Gallagher. She has exhibited in various places in Georgia, among them Gori Arthouse and 4710 Gallery.

Tamer El Said: Borrowing a Family Album

“I was four or five years old when I woke up one morning, and my sister, Eman, wasn’t there. Not only did her toys, bed, and clothes disappear, but her name also vanished along with our family photo albums. Later, I was not sure anymore if I had ever had a sister at all or if I had made up all the memories that kept haunting me after I saw that girl once in an old movie. To bring my doubts to an end, I chose to believe my sister was the fearless girl who saved her father in Kamal El Sheikh’s classic film, Life or Death. I was relieved and enjoyed inventing new memories with her. We visited new places with my family, played together by the sea, and roamed the city on fantastic adventures. I was 14 when a relative accidentally mentioned my sister’s death in front of me for the first time since she had disappeared. That day, I finally became certain of her existence, but I’ve never been able to tell which of my memories with her were  true and which were fictional.”

— the artist

Between 2020 and 2021 filmmaker Tamer El Said was mentoring the Peripheral Vision workshop, organized by the Syros International Film Festival (SIFF). Under the title repurposing the archive participants produced works dealing with local memory. The workshop focused on archive-based artistic projects, and for this purpose, the organizers created a pool of materials to be used by participants. This way El Said first encountered the personal film footage of the Rigopoulos family, which is part of the Historical Archive of the Cyclades and was mainly shot in Athens and the Cyclades Islands in Greece between 1966 and 1968. Seeing the silent, black and white footage showing the records of a young supposedly happy family with a little boy and an even younger girl, made him think of his childhood and his diffused memory of his long gone sister.

Could images of places never seen as a child help to retrieve a disoriented memory?
Could we explore stories about ourselves in memories belonging to people we never met?

Following those questions, El Said used the film material of the Rigopoulos family to trace back the memories of his own childhood, with and without his sister. Typical for his essayistic approach, in which he mixes fiction and reality, found and self-produced footage, he pairs the silent video material with recordings and sounds inspired by his own childhood memories, created in collaboration with sound designer Youssra El Hawary. Adding another layer to the project, El Said extracted stills from the video and invites spectators to pair them with their own memories.

Tamer El Said (b. 1972 in Cairo, Egypt) is a filmmaker and producer living in Berlin and Cairo. His filmography includes 17 films that have received many regional and international awards. He founded Zero Production in 2007 to produce independent films in Egypt. In 2011, he co-founded Cimatheque – Alternative Film Centre in Cairo, a multi-purpose space that offers facilities, training, and programming for the independent filmmaking community. His debut feature-length film, Akher ayam el madina (In the Last Days of the City), premiered 2016 at the Berlinale Forum, where it received
the Caligari Film Prize.