What challenges and resources do practitioners of art, documentation, and academic research share in the present, as systematic violence mounts and norms for accountability appear to be collapsing? What possibilities remain for making and sustaining networks of solidarity across local, regional, and global frameworks? This panel discussion features five contributors to the forthcoming book, Design of Necessity: Arts of Resistance and Resilience Under Siege. The book reflects on memory, activism, and accountability for Syria’s sieges, narrated through contributions from more than twenty voices, including artists, filmmakers, lawyers, activists, academics, poets, and translators. Conceptualized through lead artist Khaled Barakeh’s principle of relational art, Design of Necessity centers connection as a tool and practice of solidarity, survival, and resilience. Through its lens, the histories of Syria’s sieges – many of which remain unwritten and unarchived – invite critical reflection on contemporary struggles for justice in Syria and beyond.
Najat Abed Alsamad is a Syrian and German novelist, translator, and gynaecologist born in Suwayda and currently residing in Germany. She holds a BA in Arabic Language and Literature from Damascus University and has published seven novels and two translated books from Russian. Her novel La Maʿa Yarwiha earned her the Katara Prize for Arabic Novels in 2018. Abed Alsamad has contributed research, articles, and translations to numerous Arabic and global publications, and her works have been presented at literary and medical symposiums in both Europe and the MENA region.
Khaled Barakeh is a Syrian multidisciplinary artist whose work bridges conceptual art, social transformation, and institutional imagination. He developed what he terms The Practice of Necessity, a methodological and ethical framework shaped by urgent socio-political conditions and grounded in questions of justice, visibility, and collective agency. Working beyond the production of objects, Barakeh approaches creative processes themselves as a medium. His works, spanning installations, interventions, participatory structures, and institutional architectures, operate in the charged space between art and administration, authorship and collective agency. Barakeh’s work has been exhibited internationally, and he has been invited to speak at institutions and platforms including the World Festival on Arts and Culture, the Open Society Foundations, Tate Modern’s Who Are We? programme, Mathaf Museum, and the Salzburg Global Seminar. He has also collaborated with the EU Parliament, Amnesty International, the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), and the Danish Refugee Council. In 2023, he was shortlisted by Körber-Stiftung and Exilmuseum Berlin for the Exile Visual Arts Award. His touring installation MUTE (2020) informed his contribution to ECCHR’s Syrian State Torture on Trial (2023). In Berlin, with support from the Ford Foundation, the European Cultural Foundation, and the Allianz Foundation, he founded coculture, a nonprofit supporting cultural producers from the Global South. Recently, Barakeh was appointed Artistic Director and Curator of the inaugural Syrian Biennale for Contemporary Art.
Salma Jreige was born in Damascus and has been based in Berlin since 2014. She holds a BA in Law from Damascus University and an MA in Intercultural Conflict Management from Alice Salomon University, Berlin. From 2017 to 2022, she coordinated the acclaimed Multaka: Museum as Meeting Point project, working on cultural participation and community engagement. Currently, she works as a project coordinator and researcher with the Solidarity in Action Network and the Design of Necessity book project, focusing on promoting social, legal, and political transformation.
Guevara Namer is a photographer, producer, and documentary filmmaker who started her career in Damascus in 2007 and is currently based in Berlin. Her recent works focus on themes of identity and exile. Her project Untitled Times was showcased in Die Triennale der Photographie Hamburg 2022. She curated the exhibition LOOK AT ME, which invited 10 photographers to explore their identity as “Syrian photographers,” as part of her ongoing project Dialogue with Absence. Her own exhibition, Existing Elsewhere, was featured in Berlin during the European Month of Photography 2020. She was also selected for an art residency in Barcelona in 2017 and as a Magnum Foundation Photography and Social Justice Fellow in 2018.
Anne-Marie McManus heads the European Research Council-funded grant SYRASP—The Prison Narratives of Assad’s Syria—at Berlin’s Forum Transregionale Studien. She is the author of the academic monograph Arab Nationalism, Decolonization, and the Making of a Transregional Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2026) and numerous articles on Syrian literature, culture, and politics. Her research has been supported by the Andrew Mellon Foundation, Fritz Thyssen Foundation, NYU Abu Dhabi, and Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale University.
This event will be held in a hybrid format. To receive the login details, please register via eume(at)trafo-berlin.de.
Depending on approval by the speaker(s), the Berliner Seminar will be recorded. All audio recordings of the Berliner Seminar are available on SoundCloud.