Tales From The Caucasus: Agil Abdullayev, Echo Activism Collective, Ulviyya Iman, Ramina Saadatkhan
Gazelli Art House presents Tales from the Caucasus, featuring four artists from Azerbaijan and the surrounding region working across painting and moving image. Reflecting on personal and societal transformation, they depict contemporary life through a figurative language rich in storytelling. The artists navigate everyday scenes, often infusing them with the fantastical elements of folk tales and myths. The emotional and psychological charge of specific moments and places forms the core of the exhibition — whether a domestic living room, a city park at night, or the shoreline of the Caspian Sea.
Tales from the Caucasus places regional traditions and histories within a contemporary, globalised context, creating connections between past and present. While many of the artists are based in Europe, their works draw on stylistic roots from the Caucasus, engaging contemporary perspectives shaped by migration, cultural exchange, and autobiography.
Agil Abdullayev’s practice is an ongoing inquiry into how the queer body archives and performs identity across multiple spaces, both physical and psychological. In a new series of paintings and recent video work Abdullayev explores the entanglement of queerness and public space in post-Soviet contexts. Their work offers intimate portrayals of private realities, respecting anonymity and foregrounding resistance to preconceived notions of masculinity and social restrictions in often conservative environments. Their award-winning three-channel film Radicals in Between Trees and Dicks (2024) follows individuals navigating ‘cruising’ culture in Azerbaijan and surrounding countries — societies where homosexuality remains taboo. Abdullayev has visited over thirty cruising locations, such as public parks or discreetly designated private sex spaces, documenting their own observations and recording the experiences of others in interviews, conversations, and visual recordings.
Ulviyya Iman focuses her attention on Azerbaijan’s social structures and cultural norms, shifting between self-portraiture and observational viewpoints. Her canvases heighten emotional intensity within mundane settings, as seen in The End (2025), which depicts a meykhana, a millennia-old Sufi tradition of social gatherings where improvised verses are performed to percussive rhythms, drawing parallels with rap battles of contemporary hip hop culture. Iman was moved by a video of the final meykhana of Aydin Khirdalanli, a performer famed for his skill, and saw that it mirrored the composition of di Vinci’s The Last Supper. In Self Portrait, Red (2025), Iman confronts the viewer with a direct gaze and vivid palette, conveying a scene charged with psychological tension.
Ramina Saadatkhan’s painted collages offer a vision of inseparability between nature and human experience. Drawing on Nietzschean ideas of the “creature and creator” within, she depicts animals and foliage as expressions of inner states rather than external landscapes. Experiment Number 3 (2025) is in dialogue with the Biblical scene of The Garden of Eden and interprets themes of temptation and betrayal. Together with Pomegranate King (2025), both engage mythic imagery and archetypes, staging dynamic tensions between the human and the animal, feminine and masculine, order and chaos, creation and destruction.
Primarily working with sound and moving image, Farhad Farzali combines traditional and marginal cultures with contemporary music and popular aesthetics. His practice is rooted in anthropological research into the neo-folklore of Azerbaijan and neighbouring regions. Echoactivism I (2025) is a collaborative project with Aiganym Mukhamejan (Echo Activism Collective) that comments on the paradox of hyper-connectivity and fragile human connection. The video documents a performance addressing the ecological crisis of the Caspian Sea, in which two performers positioned on opposite shores call to each other across the water using iPhones and Bluetooth speakers as modern shamanic instruments.
Bringing together shared cultural memory, evolving values, and striking generational shifts, Abdullayev, Farzali, Iman, and Saadatkhan each develop distinct visual languages that speak to the complexities of life in and beyond the Caucasus. Through these intertwined perspectives, Tales from the Caucasus explores questions of place, identity, and belonging in a rapidly changing world.
