Leila Keivan

Lisa, bleib hier, wir kommen jeden Tag zurück is an ongoing research-based artwork that approaches the former inner German border zone as a site where historical rupture, inherited memory, and contemporary experiences of displacement intersect.The project brings together archival material, oral history, collected objects, moving image, and public participation to examine how a sense of belonging is produced after a place, a political promise, or an imagined future has disappeared. Rather than treating the archive as a stable repository of evidence, the work understands it as a fragile and contested structure: a place where memory is preserved, altered, withheld, and reassembled.The project moves between memories of the second DDR generation and the experiences of migrant women living in Thuringia. These perspectives are not collapsed into one another, but placed in relation through shared questions of loss, return, marginalisation, and the reconstruction of home. What remains after a world has shifted? How do people carry places that are no longer accessible in the same form? And how can private fragments become part of a collective, yet unstable, public memory?The work unfolds through three connected forms: a short film composed from interviews, landscapes, and archival material; a book-like herbarium of “soft inheritance” made from images, texts, objects, and personal fragments; and a living public archive that gathers subjective memories, imagined utopias, and contributions from the public.

^{Realised with the support of the Thüringer Landesstipendium für Bildende Kunst, in cooperation with SV SparkassenVersicherung.}

Liebevoll, L. is a conceptual postcard project based on the artist’s personal archive of photographs from Iran, dating from the 1960s to the 1980s.Over the course of one year, 100 handwritten postcards were released each month across Weimar. Each card carried an imagined message connected to an unknown figure from the archive. Together, they formed a quiet chain of memories: partly personal, partly fictional, and partly left for the person who found them.Placed in public spaces, the postcards created small encounters between distant lives and the present-day city. Far from the place where the images originated, the project invited passers-by to pause, read, and enter a fragment of someone else’s possible story.

^{Realised with the support of the Kreativfonds of Bauhaus-Universität Weimar}

Graveless Lovers
_{Bauhaus Hybrid Atelier, Werimar, Germany, 2024
Voice: Rand Ibrahim, Raisa Bosich, Hossein Motahar, Leila Keivan
Sound composition: Rico Graupner
Book design: Gabriella Para}

Graveless Lovers is an artistic research project on denied disaster, inherited trauma, and the persistence of unresolved loss. The project examines how human-caused disasters, especially under oppressive political systems, continue to affect individuals, families, communities, and landscapes when they are suppressed, minimized, or left unacknowledged.
Rather than treating trauma as something fixed in the past, Graveless Lovers approaches it as a living archive: something carried through bodies, memories, images, nature, and silence. When a disaster is denied, it does not disappear. It grows, repeats, and is transmitted across generations. The project asks how unburied grief can be preserved, narrated, and confronted when official systems fail to recognize it.
Through visual and research-based artistic practice, the work explores the fragile relation between victim, witness, survivor, and litigant. It reflects on the need for acknowledgment, truth-telling, and justice as ways of interrupting cycles of denial and suffering. The degraded family photograph in the book can function as a strong visual anchor for this project, connecting personal memory with collective trauma.

Shores of the body
^{Video installation
ACC Galerie, Weimar, Germany, February 2024
Technical and instructional support: Rand Ibrahim}

Birds build nests for care, not permanence. A nest is made for laying eggs, protecting fragile life, and holding a temporary state. It can also be abandoned when disturbed, when its purpose is lost, or when survival requires another place.
Shores of the Body begins from this unstable relation between nesting, returning, and leaving again. The work reflects on home not as a fixed location, but as a fragile structure made of habits, orientation, bodily memory, and repeated gestures: using the same old mug, walking without needing an address, returning to familiar routes, or hoping to meet someone who is no longer alive.
The video installation is made from the artist’s childhood photographs and projected onto a reconstructed corner of the house where she was born, a house that no longer exists. Through this projection, the absent home becomes temporarily visible. The images do not restore the past; they return as fragments, searching for a surface on which to appear.
The title refers to the body as a shoreline: a place where memory arrives, withdraws, and leaves traces behind. Like a nest, the body holds what cannot stay. Like a shore, it receives the remains of places, people, and gestures that have disappeared.
Shores of the Body asks what it means to return to a place that can no longer be entered, and whether memory can become a temporary shelter when home itself has vanished.

14.10.1964, Valencia
_{Collaborative performance / multi-sensory installation
Public Art Garage Residency, Barcelona, Spain, November 2023
In collaboration with: Eunji Lee, Rand Ibrahim, Stefan Ralevic, Teresa Fischer}

14.10.1964, Valencia is a collaborative art project that begins with a found postcard discovered in a second-hand market in Barcelona on November 2, 2023. Written in Valencia in 1964, the postcard carries a brief and mysterious promise of a future meeting. Its uncertain destination, unknown sender, and unresolved message become the starting point for a collective response across time, language, and imagination.
The project treats the postcard as a small surviving fragment of human relation. Rather than trying to solve its mystery, the artists enter into dialogue with it. They ask what remains of a message when its context is lost, whether the promised meeting ever took place, and how a private sentence from the past can still demand attention in the present.
Each collaborator was invited to spend time with the postcard, examine its traces, and write a response to the person addressed in it. These replies were written in the artists’ mother tongues, allowing different languages, rhythms, and emotional distances to gather around the original message.
In the final performance, the letters are read simultaneously. As the voices overlap, full comprehension becomes impossible. What remains is not a single narrative, but an accumulation of fragments: tones, pauses, repetitions, and emotional residues. The work transforms communication into a shared act of listening, where the unheard is not translated, but amplified.
14.10.1964, Valencia creates a fragile bridge between past and present. It asks how forgotten messages continue to move through time, and how small traces of unknown lives can become a space for collective memory, speculation, and care.

^{Photo credit: Eunji Lee
Residency funded by Erasmus}

Sun of the Midnight
_{Archival installation
Documentation: Hossein Motahar
Blumenladen, Weimar, 2022
Found and Felt, Hong Kong, 2025
Maxim Gorki Theater, Berlin, 2025}

“Sometimes I look at the clock and try to guess your time. I think you’re too afraid to tell me that you miss me, that you want to see me…”Sun of the Midnight is an archival installation composed of mirrors, light, and photographs. The work reflects on the unstable relationship between memory, absence, displacement, and self-perception.
The installation is rooted in Leila Keivan’s personal archive: a collection of photographs of unknown people gathered over five years in Iran. Many of these images capture intimate moments before the 1978 Revolution. Brought to Germany in a small suitcase, the photographs gradually became more than a collection. They began to carry traces of departure, longing, and the shifting meaning of home.
By placing archival images in relation to mirrors and focused light, the work creates an encounter between the viewer’s reflection and the photographed figures. The viewer becomes both observer and part of the image field. In this fragile space, anonymous lives are brought into dialogue with the present, while memory appears not as something fixed, but as something that continues to look back.

Um Mitternacht: Wenn eine Epoche endet.
_{Goethe-Nationalmuseum, Weimar, Germany, 2025}

Um Mitternacht: Wenn eine Epoche endet takes the form of a fictional travel diary. It follows a traveler who enters a nameless city that, according to an old sailors’ legend, appears only once every thousand years under the full moon.The city is imagined as a meeting point between Weimar, the city of Goethe, and Shiraz, the city of Hafez. Through this encounter, the work reflects on a life lived between two cultural and emotional geographies: between memory and arrival, departure and return, the place one has left and the place one is still learning to inhabit.When the traveler returns, no one believes that the city exists. She is called a dreamer, someone who has mistaken longing for reality. In response, she begins to collect and present evidence. These fictional proofs take the form of chlorophyll prints: old landscapes of Weimar, extracted from historical drawings and printed onto leaves that grow in the geography of Shiraz.The evidence is fragile, unstable, and alive. It does not prove the city in a factual sense, but reveals the emotional truth of its existence. Weimar appears through Shiraz; memory appears through nature; and the imagined city becomes visible only through the materials that carry traces of both places.In the legend, reaching the city marks the end of one epoch and the beginning of another. Yet this transition does not bring resolution. Instead, it carries a quiet and persistent sadness: the realization that the places once left behind can no longer be found in the same way, and that the new place cannot immediately become one’s own.The traveler belongs only to the city that appears once every thousand years, and now carries its legend as both memory and curse.

^{Realised with the support of the Klassikstiftung Weimar}

Narration of the Lost Moment
^{Archival installation
Bauhaus Museum, Weimar, Germany, September 2022
Documentation: Hossein Motahar}

Narration of the Lost Moment is an archival installation that explores touch as a forbidden form of remembering. In archives and museums, the past is often protected by distance: objects may be looked at, but not touched. This work interrupts that rule by inviting the audience into a direct tactile encounter with archival photographs and objects.
The installation asks what happens when the archive is no longer separated from the body. Through touch, viewers encounter fragile traces of unknown lives not as fixed historical evidence, but as surfaces marked by absence, time, and loss. The fingertips become a way of approaching what cannot be fully seen, translated, or recovered.
This encounter is intimate, but also uncertain. Touch does not grant access to the past, nor does it allow the viewer to possess another person’s memory. Instead, it creates a brief physical relation with histories that remain incomplete and unreachable.
By removing the prohibition of contact, Narration of the Lost Moment transforms the archive from a distant visual order into a living and unstable space of attention. The work asks how memory might be activated through the body, and how the remains of unknown lives can be sensed without being fully known.

No One Can Resist the Light
_{Public intervention
Tehran, Iran, December 2021}

No One Can Resist the Light is a series of site-specific public interventions in which Leila Keivan projects images from her private family archive onto architectural facades in Tehran.
Domestic photographs, usually held within the intimate space of family memory, are enlarged to the scale of the city. Through this gesture, private images enter the public field and temporarily occupy the visual language of urban infrastructure, advertising, and authority.
The work creates a confrontation between personal memory and the controlled visibility of public space. By projecting images of Iranian women onto the city’s surfaces, Keivan interrupts dominant forms of representation and makes visible lives, gestures, and histories that are often simplified, erased, or contained.
Light becomes both medium and resistance. It allows the archive to appear briefly, yet monumentally, across the city. In this act, private memory is no longer hidden or passive; it becomes a luminous presence that insists on being seen.

Perfect Storm
_{Public space performance
Chemnitz, Germany, January 2022
Performers: Rand Ibrahim, Hala Masri, Katharina Hüttermann, Racheal Thorleifson
Documentation: Carlos Santos}

Perfect Storm explores the moment when grief changes perception. The veil emerges from the experience of seeing the world through tears: blurred, softened, painful, but also strangely lighter. In the performance, this altered vision is translated into fabric and movement, allowing the artist to approach the unfamiliar city not by controlling it, but by touching it through vulnerability.
The work begins from an emotional state in which the body continues to move through everyday life, while the eyes reveal what the mind is struggling to contain. Walking, working, crossing streets, and performing daily duties continue, but vision becomes unstable. The body and inner life seem disconnected, almost working separately, yet still cooperate in order to keep moving.
In the performance, fabric moves through the streets like an extension of blurred vision. It becomes a curtain of tears, a temporary shelter, and a fragile surface between the performer and the city. It softens the urban environment without hiding it, creating a relation based not on possession or belonging, but on exposure, uncertainty, and care.
At the center of the work is the question: what if life were lighter? Here, lightness does not mean escape from pain. It refers to the possibility that heaviness, grief, and unfamiliarity might be transformed through movement, wind, fabric, and the body’s attempt to remain present.
Perfect Storm stages home-making as an unfinished and unstable process. It asks how the unknown can be encountered through a damaged visual field, and how a city might become briefly bearable when seen through the fragile veil of tears.

Out of the Fog

Site specific Video Installation
Documentation: Hossein Motahar, Racheal Thorleifson
Bauhaus Museum, Weimar, Germany, May 2022"Artworks in museums are like fish in aquariums. They may be preserved, but they are also removed from their natural environment, drained of life, and reduced to mere spectacles for passive consumption."
Situationistische Internationale, 1960sWhat if archives could grace the public realm, free from the clutches of guarded institutions? What if, instead of commercial fare, people beheld their heritage adorning facades? Or perhaps, in a tender embrace, individuals unveiled their personal narratives, unveiling cherished archives for all to witness.

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Weimar on Mirror

Sketch for a site specific installation
Concept: Leila Keivan
3D: Aboulfazl Karoubi
Graphic: Reza Farzanyar
December 2021The Weimar on Mirror art project seeks to create a distinctive and subjective encounter of the old town of Weimar. The emphasizes on the sense of place rather than the location itself by constructing a miniature version of the old town map.This project offers visitors a personalized way to engage with the city, regardless of whether they are citizens or tourists.The assembled facades of the art installation serve as a canvas for visitors to project their personal photos taken in Weimar. These projected photos are allowed to be manipulated and surreal, reflecting the unique and subjective way individuals perceive a place based on their psyche. This encourages visitors to feel a sense of belonging as their subjectivity is regarded as valid and acceptable.Moreover, the act of wandering and walking without any particular destination is a vital aspect of this project. By enabling visitors to explore and wander freely through the miniature version of the old town, they can discover and experience the city from a fresh perspective. This fosters a deeper connection with the city and enables visitors to immerse themselves in Weimar's rich cultural history.

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About

Leila Keivan (b. Iran) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Germany. Her work explores the archive as a living psychological space, focusing on "emotional remains"—the fragments of memory, dreams, and unconscious wounds that linger after transitions.
Working as a "nomadic archivist" through an "adrift methodology," Keivan collects and assembles narratives that mirror the fluidity of contemporary life. Her practice seeks to narrate shared human vulnerabilities, creating immersive environments where the living and the lost coexist.
Keivan holds an MFA in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies from Bauhaus University Weimar (2024), alongside an MA in Photography and a BA in Carpet Design from the Art University of Tehran. Since 2008, she has participated in over twenty exhibitions and international residencies across Europe.

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• Leila.keivan.hosseini［@］uni-weimar.de

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News

Interview with MDR Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk: Wie eine Weimarer Künstlerin DDR-Erinnerungen mit Migrationsgeschichten verbindet

Interview with suboartmagazineInternational Magazine for Emerging Artists

Landesstipendium Bildende Kunst 2026 mit der SV SparkassenVersicherung für Leila Keivan

Leila Keivan erhält ein Thüringer Landesstipendium für Bildende Kunst, das die Kulturstiftung Thüringen gemeinsam mit der @svsparkassenversicherungde vergibt.Leila Keivan schloss 2024 ihr Studium im Bereich Kunst im öffentlichen Raum und neue künstlerische Strategien an der @bauhaus_uni @stadtweimar ab. In ihrem multidisziplinären Schaffen richtet Leila Keivan den Blick auf Archive und »emotionale Überbleibsel«. Während des Landesstipendiums wird sich die gebürtige Iranerin mit dem Projekt »Das Archiv einer verschwundenen Utopie: Lisa, bleib hier, wir kommen jeden Tag zurück« dem Thema aus Sicht der zweiten Generation DDR-Bürger und Menschen mit Migrationsgeschichte widmen.
Leila Keivan graduated in 2024 with a degree in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies from the Bauhaus University Weimar. In her multidisciplinary work, Leila Keivan Hosseini focuses on archives and »emotional remains«. During her scholarship, the Iranian-born artist will focus on the topic from the perspective of second-generation GDR citizens and people with a migration background in her project »The Archive of a Vanished Utopia: Lisa, Stay Here, We'll Come Back Every Day«

Kiosk for a Magic FutureInitiated by Danica Dakić, Ina Weise, Lea Maria Wittich & Arijit Bhattacharyya.
As part of the 7th Berliner [Herbstsalon ЯE:IMAGINE: THE RED HOUSE
From 2/Oktober to 30/November at KIOSK, Maxim Gorki Theater, Berlin

FOUND & FELT brings together more than 20 artists, including participants based in Hong Kong, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, as well as others from across the world-Thailand, India, Iran, Australia, and beyond. Many works reflect diasporic experiences and personal journeys, travelling across continents to be found and felt.
Curators: Kylie Chung and Jennifer Yue
October - November 2025,Crash Space, Hong Kong

Pop-up-Ausstellung zum 276. Geburtstag Goethes auf der Terrasse des Goethe-Nationalmuseums
August 28th, Weimar

Übersicht der diesjährigen Weimar-Fellows, Nietzsche-Fellows und Bauhaus-Fellows in chronologischer Reihenfolge

Für den Einstieg in die Promotion
THEMA: IN MEMORY OF GRAVELESS LOVERS - a study on roll of denied disaster in oppressive regimes and their effect on intergenerational traumas in future

Ausstellung Winterwerkschau der Bauhaus-Universität, Studierende des MFA-Programms «Kunst im öffentlichen Raum und neue künstlerische Strategien» sowie der Fakultät Kunst und Gestaltung der Bauhaus-Universität WeimarFr., 02.02.2024–So., 21.04.2024, Acc Gallery , Weimar

Curated by 11m3 projektraum , We are proud to invite you to Over and Over, An exhibition co-created with students and alumni of the MFA in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies at the Bauhaus Universitat weimar.
Over & Over is a one day group show that explores the conjunction of multiple identities and narratives, sewn together by acts of building and organizing.
If you are in Berlin please come visit the exhibition on the 25th of November from 14:00 at the OTTO in Haus der Statistik: Otto-Braun-Straße 70-72 10178 Berlin.
- Poster design: @jenniferyue

Mit dem Kreativfonds werden an der Bauhaus-Universität Weimar künstlerisch-gestalterische Projekte gefördert.

Warm invitation to the exhibition "Directly at the sun" // Opening 2.2 |/ 7pm //Blumenhaus, Poseckscher Garten 1, Weimar
"Why be a sunflower and turn to the sun? I myself am the sun." Ousmane Sembène, Caméra D'Afrique, 1983
Given the current confusion and challenges of the world that we live in, the exhibition "Directly at the Sun" serves as a greenhouse for blossoms of different colours and directions of artistic practice.
Throughout the winter semester, the artists of the MFA "Public Art and New Artistic Strategies" explored how art can contribute to societies shaped by heterogeneous experiences of displacement, migration, and confrontation with a past and present of war and violence. How can we, as people and artists, reorient and act in new, challenging situations, spaces, and complex thematic worlds? The exhibition shares the development of the artists' works after their two weeks of residency at Kunsthaus Dresden's "North-East South-West" exhibition project in Autumn 2022.
Throughout the semester, the artists engaged in a multifaceted discussion on "disorientation" concerning the structures and content of contemporary artistic practices. From this ground, intersectional methods of collaboration between the production of art and curatorial strategies are growing into a future in which hegemonies are dismantled. The works develop new strategies of spatial and social orientation and disorientation in the tension between self-location and global relationality. 'Directly at the sun' is an exhibition, that celebrates the pluralities of life and world views.
The exhibition showcases the works of the MFA programme "Public Art and New Artistic Strategies" of the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. 'Directly at the sun' is organised by Vertr.- Prof. Ina Weise, Lea Maria Wittich, Arijit Bhattacharyya and Jirka Reichmann (Co-ordination). The exhibition is realised with the support of Kreativefonds.

Join us in this semester adventure together with Klassik Stiftung of Weimar in Bauhaus Museum
IMAGINARY BAUHAUS MUSEUM is a collaboration between the international MFA-Programme „Public Art and New Artistic Strategies" at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar and the Klassik Stiftung Weimar.
Begun in 2015, it was designed as a long-term project with various exhibition locations. During the 2019 Bauhaus anniversary, it was presented in Weimar at the Schiller-Museum (April 3 to June 2) and in public spaces around the city (April to July), and will continue beyond the anniversary year.
It was with student works that the collection of the historic Bauhaus began in 1919 and with which the Weimar museum director Wilhelm Köhler realized an internationally significant museum policy. In 1925, during the politically forced relocation of the Bauhaus to Dessau, he and Walter Gropius selected 168 works from the workshops for the Weimar Museum.
Today, students, alumni and teachers of the international MFA-Programme are taking up the momentum for research and experimentation in order to test how the utopian potential of the Bauhaus can be activated for a museum collection of the future. Since 2015, the IMAGINARY BAUHAUS MUSEUM project has been tackling the social, economic and political issues of the present at selected exhibition stations in order to imagine 168 artistic works for a future Bauhaus collection. The internationality of the artists with their respective biographies and cultural backgrounds opens up different ways of seeing and acting.

How can we make our body and our clothes the carrier of images, thoughts, visions and desires? How do we place ourselves in our surroundings? How do we become visible as individuals in a community, in public space?
Based on the large textile and arts and crafts collection in the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, young international artists from the MFA
"Public Art and New Artistic Strategies" will explore current conflicts and contradictions of a complex society. Performative or participatory actions, research, interventions and installations will be developed in the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz and in urban space.
A discussion with the participating artists and the audience will take place on January 28, 2022 in the museum's Saulensaal. It will be moderated by the curator of the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, Dr. Sabine Maria Schmidt .
Come over:
Friday January 28th until Sunday January 30th from 11:00-18:00
DU KANNST DAS TRAGEN is a project of the MFA PANAS supported by the Kreativfonds of the Bauhaus-Universitat Weimar, idea: Ina Weise, direction:
Danica Dakić, Ina Weise, Lea Maria Wittich und Jirka Reichmann

In Zusammenarbeit mit 11m3 projektraum, DAZWISCHEN
Ein Gemeinsames Projekt von neue Studenten des Kunst im öffentlichen Raum (M.F.A.) programm an der Bauhaus-Universität Weimar.
Dazwischen ist ein Gruppenprojekt, das 8 Personen verbindet, die nichts voneinander wissen. Im Schaufenster wird die Verbindung sowohl für das Publikum als auch für die Autoren durch die mitgebrachten persönlichen Objekte und Geschichten sichtbar.Wir eröffnen die Ausstellung als internationales Team, Freunde, Künstler, Fremde, eine Gemeinschaft.
04.10.21 - 17.10.21