First of all, we would like to warmly welcome Zahra Mammadova to Regensburg and thank her for joining us as a guest researcher.
Gözde: You originally trained in linguistics before moving into the field of contemporary art and curatorial practice. Could you tell us about this journey?
Zahra: My academic background is in linguistics and English language teaching, so at first glance it might seem like a very different path. For me, however, the connection gradually revealed itself during my studies, when I became drawn to semantics, structuralism, and deconstruction as modes of thought and methodological approaches. Over time, I became increasingly interested in visual forms, especially moving images and cinema. Through this interest, I became fascinated by art and its role in reflecting social, political, and cultural realities.
This interest led me to YARAT Contemporary Art Space in Baku during the final year of my studies, where I started as a guide and later worked as an educational programmes assistant. After six months, I moved to the curatorial department, where I assisted the curatorial team and art managers with exhibitions and public programmes. Working there was an important turning point because it showed me that curating is not only about displaying artworks. It also involves research, dialogue with artists, archival work, writing, and creating connections between artworks and wider historical and social contexts.
One aspect of curatorial work that I particularly enjoy is research. I spend a great deal of time working with state archives, interviewing artists, and exploring the histories behind artistic practices in order to construct new meanings and narratives through exhibition-making. For me, curating is a form of knowledge production that brings together different perspectives and invites audiences to think critically about the world around them. What I also value about curating is the range of possibilities for knowledge and practice that it encompasses. An especially important part of what brought me to the field is caring about artists and their practices, and learning about their ways of thinking and creative approaches.
Gözde: You are currently pursuing an MA in Art History and Visual Culture at Masaryk University. How has this experience shaped your intellectual and professional development?
Zahra: After several years of working as a curator, mostly with local emerging artists, I realised that I wanted to deepen the theoretical foundations of my practice. I did not have a formal theoretical background and had largely navigated the field intuitively and through self-directed learning. In order to engage more closely with the global art world and have greater agency within it, I decided to pursue an art history degree in Europe. At the same time, I wanted to address a gap in my practice by developing my ability to produce written work and document projects in a professional, research-based way. This is how I decided to pursue a Master's degree in Art History and Visual Culture at Masaryk University in Brno.
Living in Brno has been a completely new experience for me, both personally and academically. The programme has introduced me to methodologies and approaches specific to art history, which I believe will also contribute to my curatorial work.
Coming from a practical background, I constantly find myself thinking about how theory can influence exhibition-making. Academic research encourages me to ask different kinds of questions: not only what an artwork represents, but also how knowledge is produced, whose perspectives are included or excluded, and how institutions shape cultural narratives. These experiences have also influenced my current research interests, especially questions related to environmental humanities, memory, identity, and the relationship between contemporary art and political change.
Gözde: One of your ongoing research projects examines artistic representations of the Caspian Sea. Could you tell us more about this project?
Zahra: This project began with my personal interest in and close observation of the growing environmental disaster around the Caspian. I consciously decided to refer to it as the Caspian Lake, rather than the Caspian Sea, because this reflects its geographical character as an enclosed body of water and, for me, conveys more clearly how alarming its shrinkage is. What started as a curious observation in 2018, followed by conversations with colleagues working on ecological studies, gradually developed into a curatorial response.
Following our discussions, Farah Alakbarli, the current director of YARAT, suggested beginning with a broader overview and exploring the dialogue between different generations of artists. This expanded scope ultimately benefited the project in several ways, despite presenting certain challenges, and enabled a broader historical and artistic contextualization of its ecological concerns.
When researching artworks from the socialist period that responded to the Caspian, we encountered significant challenges in finding works that were critical or reflective. We realised that Soviet-era Azerbaijani artists often treated the Caspian as a background motif for oil production, reflecting the regime's extractive view of the body of water. The Caspian itself remained a secondary consideration. Another recurring motif was the Caspian seashore as a place of leisure for Bakuvians. This led me to look more closely at written sources, where I encountered a foundational text that helped shape the project.
The late Azerbaijani thinker and culturologist Rahman Badalov shared with me a collection of essays by the Azerbaijani sociologist Hasan Guliyev, written in the early 1990s. In Archetypal Azeris: Faces of Mentality (Arxetipik azərilər: Mentalitetin simaları), Guliyev proposes a set of archetypes through which to understand Azerbaijani identity, including a “Sea” archetype. To my surprise, he argued that Azerbaijanis had historically been relatively detached from this part of the natural landscape, partly because threats of invasion had often come from the sea. According to his interpretation, they were more closely connected to the land and did not develop substantial rituals or oral traditions around the body of water. He also discusses Persian cultural influences, including the migration of the fantastic sea creature “Runanshah” into Azerbaijani folklore.
This prompted us to begin archival research, particularly using video archives and archaeological findings from beneath the Caspian. One striking example was a propaganda video from the 1950s that presented the Caspian through the language of conquest: “We conquer the Sea, the Sea is ours.” This opened a new trajectory for the project. The exhibition, which brought together works by Soviet-era and contemporary artists, highlighted not only ecological disaster but also the colonial past and its continuing industrial legacy, paving the way for an exploration of decolonial strategies.
I am interested in how these representations have changed over time. The shrinking shoreline, pollution, the impact of the oil industry, and climate change have transformed not only the physical landscape but also the emotional and cultural meanings attached to the Caspian. For many artists, it has become a place where personal memories intersect with broader questions of belonging, loss, environmental responsibility, and the future. For this reason, we invited a younger generation of contemporary artists to respond to these questions through diverse media and approaches.
Gözde: To what extent can these changing representations be understood within broader post-Soviet and decolonial transformations?
Zahra: I think artists in Azerbaijan responded to the transformations of the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods by turning towards nature and the cultural landscape. From the late 1980s onwards, they became increasingly interested in folklore, mysticism, and questions of origin, reclaiming what had been “tamed” during the Soviet period. Cultural traditions associated with Zoroastrianism and fire, alongside shamanistic influences, became important points of reference. Mysticism and spirituality provided artists with a vocabulary through which they could make sense of collapse and new beginnings, while natural landscapes became a way of exploring environmental identity and the relationship between people and place.
In the Caspian project, however, we primarily looked at the Soviet period and the present, rather than focusing specifically on the emerging artistic practices of the 1990s and their connections to decolonial approaches to Azerbaijan's natural landscapes. Among the younger artists, I also observed a stronger emphasis on subjective experiences and memories of water than on explicitly decolonial interpretations of the environmental crisis. An important next step would therefore be to examine these earlier practices more closely and place them in conversation with artists from the wider region. I also hope to collaborate with more artists and cultural workers addressing environmental questions through performance, relational aesthetics, and socially engaged art.
Gözde: After spending time in Regensburg as a guest researcher, what are your reflections on this experience and on your future research plans?
Zahra: My time in Regensburg gave me an opportunity to reflect on my current research from different perspectives and to think about how I might develop it further. Our discussions raised a number of new research questions, particularly concerning the relationship between sexuality, gender, and religion in post-Soviet Azerbaijani art. I became interested in examining when and how these themes began to emerge in artistic practices, how they relate to the broader social and cultural transformations of the post-Soviet period, and how these developments might be traced across different forms of cultural production.
The visit also encouraged me to think beyond contemporary art alone. Literature, for example, could provide an important comparative perspective, as Azerbaijani authors have also engaged with questions of gender, sexuality, and changing post-Soviet realities. I am now also interested in exploring desire as a concept for understanding the historical trajectory of Azerbaijani contemporary art, particularly in relation to changing representations of spirituality, gender, and sexuality. Bringing these different perspectives and forms of cultural production into conversation could open up new directions for my research.
More broadly, the visit also made me think about how I want to develop my research methodologically. I am interested in combining archival research with interdisciplinary approaches, artistic collaborations, and new media, as well as exploring alternative ways of presenting research beyond conventional academic writing. The experience has therefore helped me formulate new questions and identify directions that I would like to pursue in my future work.
I would like to sincerely thank the entire Regensburg team for inviting me as a guest researcher, and thank you, Gözde, for such an interesting conversation!
Gözde: Thank you, Zahra. It was a pleasure having you with us in Regensburg. We look forward to following the development of your research and seeing where these new questions take your work.