Larissa Araz (Istanbul, 1990) is an artist and founder of Poşe artist-run space in Istanbul, Turkey.She studied Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, NY, USA and Visual Arts at Koç University in Istanbul, TR. She participated in Saha Studio residency from 2019-2020 and Arter Research Program in 2020-2021. She was a recipient of the Prince Claus Seed Award in 2021 and fellow at WHW Akademija in 2023. As part of Artist Development program of European Investment Bank she was invited to Cite des Arts Paris residency. She participated in Onassis Artist Residency in 2024.

Araz focuses on alternative histories, non-human witnesses, and the construction of dominant ideologies through institutional knowledge production. Through personal narratives, she researches documents, archives, ruins, silences, names, traces, and memories that are not included in, or kept hidden from social memory. Between reality and fiction, she tries to discuss possible futures and unrevealed pasts. She uses different mediums in her practice but mainly focuses on text and image-making.

She is also the other half of palimpsest (with author Ekin Can Göksoy) which departs from the ancient belief that nothing is as it seems. With an approach far surpassing the modern conceptualization of the archive, where historical records are brought together and classified. palimpsest attempts to create an archive of the annotations on the margins of manuscripts, the decorations crumbling from the walls of buildings, the written messages behind found photographs, and the testimony of what is no longer there.

Araz founded Poşe Artist Run Space in April 2018. Poşe is conceived with an urge to establish a community. It is a physical and mental open-space for those who feel the need for dialogue and critique. Poşe has displayed many exhibitions including solo and group productions along with public programming and other content.

Aria Farajnezhad (1989, Ahwaz) is a multidisciplinary artist and organizer with a background in engineering and a long-term engagement with rhythm and playing percussion. He is a sound and image examiner whose work encompasses various mediums, leaning towards speculative forensis. Farajnezhad is the recipient of the Kunstverein Hannover Award (2025/2026), the 2024 fellow of  HIAP (Helsinki International Artist Program), the 2023 fellow of WHW Akademija (Zagreb, Croatia), and the 2018/2019 fellow of Ashkal Alwan’s Home Workspace Program (Beirut, Lebanon). Between 2020-2022 he co-ran the project space Circa 106 (Bremen, Germany) and co-created the Future Archives project series (Worpswede/ Saarbrücken/Bitterfeld/Bremen, Germany). Aria holds a Diploma from the faculty of fine arts at the University of Arts Bremen where he completed the Meisterschüler*innen program in July 2022 with Natascha Sadr Haghighian. Since January 2023, Farajnezhad’s inquiry around the destabilizing preservation/destruction dichotomy pertaining to the former state central bank building in Bremen found a leg in scrutinizing further the politics of over/non/under-representation imbued in public space constructions. He has been conducting collective settings in which the racist mosaic mural in Bremen’s central station could be critically examined and collectively overwritten, to suggest otherwise accounts that share ecumenical, hybrid, and non-hierarchical views on the notion of humanity. Since 2023 he has initiated a conversation series called Mosaic Speaking to craft an inter-local, trans-regional dialogue through carrying over-written mosaics with various interlocutors, tarrying with the diasporic break as a generative force. The conversation series has dwelled in multiple places among which the AIR InSILo (Hollabrunn/Vienna, Austria) and HIAP (Helsinki/Turku, Finland) to weave them to the particularity of Bremen’s role in colonialism and slavery. Farajnezhad in May 2024 co-published the newspaper Probe-1 with GAK Bremen and co-edited a lecture-performance designed as a dialogic session at the University of Liverpool together with Azadeh Sarjoughian around artistic methodology and the notion of the living archive.

Larissa Araz and Aria Farajnezhad are currently in residency at the Tarabya Cultural Academy from February 2025 to May 2025 as part of the German-Turkish co-production program supported by the Allianz Foundation.