Archipelago of Whispers, curated by Deniz Kirkali and Elham Puriya Mehr, explores alternative infrastructures for knowledge-making such as whispers, murmurs, hums, gossip, and storytelling: a constellation of islands connected through the sea, where speech and silence, the felt and the known, the self and the other continuously flow into one another.
Beyond conventional epistemologies, there is a need to cultivate more informal modes of knowing through which knowledges take shape in togetherness, shared listening, and the circulation of stories. Gossip can be understood not through its negative connotations, but as an ambiguous, affective, caring, and relational space; a way of exploring the potentialities of collective knowledge-making. Especially at a time when digital media increasingly captures our attention, these interpersonal and whispered narratives invite us to contemplate how we make meaning together across distances and differences.
How can we create space for engaging with shifting, open-ended and shared narratives through embodied research grounded in fluidity and curiosity?
Through video, multi-channel and sound installations, Archipelago of Whispers unfolds as a listening ecology that prioritizes sound, voice, silence, and participation – a space where communication extends beyond humans, where voices overlap and create meanings through fragmentation. Performative and participatory gestures, echoing gossip’s restless drift and continual mutation, trace how words ripple outward, shaping the shared landscapes of collective imagination.
In Archipelago of Whispers, gossip moves through social spaces, streets, and domestic interiors, carrying possibilities yet to emerge and gathering longing, speculation, and echoes of experience. Within this movement, viewers become listeners and co-authors, inhabiting an acoustic archipelago in which whispers are not noise, but what lives between speech and silence, presence and absence, truth and imagination.
About the Curators
Deniz Kirkali and Elham Puriya Mehr are two independent curators from neighboring countries, Turkey and Iran.
They both hold PhD's in curatorial studies and artistic research and met in London through the Advanced Practices Lab at Goldsmiths University, led by Irit Rogoff, where they collaborated on multiple projects.
In 2024, they started their collective research around the notion of gossip with an upcoming research residency in Turkey in June 2026, supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.
Deniz Kirkali is an independent curator and writer from Turkiye, based in London. She holds a PhD in Advanced Practices and an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, University of London.
Kirkali is a co-founder of topsoil, a transnational curatorial and research collective, and Garp Sessions, a summer residency programme in Babakale, Turkey. Her recent curatorial projects include Whether it’s a desert or not is irrelevant (Imalat-hane, Bursa), Sweet Garden of Vanishing Desires (Arton, Istanbul), Reciprocity Muscles (Cala, Berlin), My Dear Friends (Depo, Istanbul) and Make it Hot, Cool it Down, Turn it Over (London).
She was assistant curator of the 10th BACA Award Exhibition at Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, the Pavilion of Turkey at the 58th Venice Biennale, and BAHAR, the Istanbul offsite project of Sharjah Biennial 13.
Recently, she served as managing editor of YAZ Publication Series as part of Sharjah Biennial 16. Her writing has been published in AQNB, Flash Art, this is tomorrow, Cogito, and Art Unlimited. She is the co-author of Otomy (2022) and winner of Volumes Book Award 2022. Currently, she is based between Istanbul and London.
Elham Puriya Mehr is an Iranian/Canadian artist, curator, scholar, and writer based in Vancouver BC. She holds a BA and MA from the University of Art in Tehran, a PhD in Art Research from Alzahra University, and completed a Research Fellowship in Advanced Practice at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research explores the potentialities of social-space atmospheres to generate alternative forms of learning and knowledge-making, activated through the possibilities opened up by “events.”
Puriya Mehr has held academic appointments at Sooreh University, where she served as Chair of Graduate Studies in the Applied Arts Department (2005–2008); at the University of Art in Tehran (2005–2009); and at Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver (2017–2019), among other institutions.
She was a Research Associate with the freethought collective (2021–2022) and has curated numerous exhibitions and public art projects, including both her own sculptural works and those of other artists. Her selected curatorial activities include co-curating Unfolding Desire at Trieste Contemporanea (Trieste, 2025); delivering a lecture at the National Museum of Iran (Tehran, 2025); serving as Artistic Director of the international symposium Contact Zone (Tehran, 2024); leading the curatorial team for Live Assembly: Repair and Care (LIVE Biennale, Vancouver, 2021); curating Club 29 at Ag Experiment (Tehran, 2018); curating I Am Here at Ag Galerie (Tehran, 2017); co-curating Beyond History at Framer Framed (Amsterdam, 2015); and curating for The Fourth Annual Sanandaj (Kurdistan Province, Iran, 2013).
Puriya Mehr is the co-director of Empty Space Studio, a nomadic, non-profit organization based in Tehran, London, and Vancouver.