We are delighted to invite you to the opening of »Exposed Layers«, a solo installation by artist Elham Hadian, created during the residency program “Artists in Archaeology”, on June 16 at 6pm at the Barvinskyi Art Gallery. This residency is a collaborative project initiated by Barbara Horejs, Deputy Managing Director of the Austrian Archaeological Institute, and Rosaura Cauchi, Director of Barvinskyi Art Gallery.
Elham Hadian is an Iranian multimedia artist who was born in Tehran in 1984. She studied painting in Tehran and is currently studying video and video installation at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Hadian started as a painter and photographer in Iran and works in Vienna in the field of video and animation.
»Exposed Layers« is the result of an artistic engagement with archaeological fieldwork in southern Serbia’s Leskovac Basin, a site of early Neolithic settlement of Svinjarička Čuka. The residency offered Hadian the opportunity to work closely with archaeologists and scientists from the Pusta Reka Research Collaboration - a partnership between the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Archaeological Institute in Belgrade, in cooperation with the Archaeological Museum of Leskovac. Initiated in 2017, this collaboration investigates human interaction with the landscape from the Early Neolithic through the Bronze Age. Fieldwork and surveys conducted in the region have uncovered valuable insights into prehistoric life and environmental change.
Hadian’s installation emerges from this context, reflecting on the dialogue between past and present, material and memory. In her own words:
»The past exists as both a blueprint and a fragment—offering a foundation upon which the present is reimagined. My work explores the interplay between materiality and memory, layering absence and presence to reveal how traces of history shape what is and what could be.«