Bistro 21

What happens to your sense of time when everything feels unsettled? 
This exhibition brings together artists Aischa Gianna Müller, Abdessamad El Montassir, Liu Yujia & Gulshat Gubaidullina to explore how time, memory & displacement shape the way we live, remember & imagine. They ask: how can feeling out of place become a powerful way to rethink the world?

Abdessamad El Montassir’s film Galb’Echaouf lets desert plants like daghmous speak of migration and trauma. He rewrites linear history through stories of anticipation, silence, and memory rooted in the land. Here, the desert remembers what people try to forget.

Aischa Gianna Müller films the sun crossing the antimeridian–the International Date Line that splits East and West. She looks at how sunlight and timezones became tools of control, from colonial clocks to synchronized trains. Her work turns the sun into a witness of global power.

Gulshat Gubaidullina traces the destruction of a mountain village in Tatarstan through photos and hand-drawn maps. The Chupaevsky quarry is gone–but what if ruins don’t just show the past, but hint at the future? What if landscapes remember?

Liu Yujia follows the colonial path of archaeologist M. A. Stein in China. Her film Treasure Hunt questions how digging into the past rewrites landscapes–and how fiction and history blur. Time becomes layered: real and imagined, above and below ground.

The project is being realized as a final project of the Master’s program Cultures of the Curatorial at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig. It is hosted by Büro für kulturelle Übersetzungen.