Tama xwînê ji ava hinaran te
Fruit of the Dead is a film and photographic project by Êvar Huseynî that examines archives as sites produced through labor, repetition, and endurance. Working with personal and collective memory, the project considers how Kurdish histories are carried through acts that are often domestic, unrecorded, and physically demanding. Rather than passively treating the archive as something inherited or discovered, the work understands it as something actively made.
At the center of the film is an endurance performance in which the main character cuts open eighty pomegranates. The action is slow, repetitive, and accumulative, drawing attention to duration and the limits of the body. The pomegranate, often associated with death, fertility, and the afterlife, appears here not as a symbol but as material resistance. Its weight, staining, and density demand time and physical commitment, aligning the act of cutting with the work of remembering.
In this context, the pomegranate as the Fruit of the Dead points to archives formed through accumulation rather than resolution. Seeds multiply even as the fruit is destroyed; memory expands through fragmentation. This tension reflects Kurdish historical experience, shaped by dispersal, suppression, and survival without institutional preservation.
Fruit of the Dead approaches Kurdish feminism as a method grounded in embodied labor. Repetition and endurance foreground forms of work that are typically feminized and overlooked, positioning women as producers of historical knowledge rather than symbols of continuity. The project resists narratives of recovery or repair, foregrounding instead the conditions under which memory is sustained.
Film by Êvar Huseynî. Courtesy of the artist.