Handle with Care – exhibition and series of meditations
February – September 2026
“Handle with Care” is an exhibition on the go accompanied by a series of meditations. A seemingly unremarkable travel suitcase carries six artistic projects inspired by family archives, created by artists Lilit Matevosyan, Gulshat Gubaidullina, V-L-V-SH-M-D, Vladimir Seleznev, Katya Selezneva. Along its journey through Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Georgia, France, Austria, and Germany, the suitcase makes stops, actively inviting further artists and collaborators to join. It engages with local communities, and gathers new artistic voices to be shown together in a final exhibition in Frankfurt am Main.
The presence and absence in private archives, as well as in vernacular photography, is a fruitful soil for meaning-making. As a form of micro-memory and mundane domestic practice, family collections were often overseen by authorities in the past and thus managed to collect material and visual traces of human experiences and contexts. “Handle with Care” presents both a journey of a growing visual collection on the one hand, and the path of a suitcase as an infrastructural research into human disconnections and connections on the other.
The project deals with questions: Who can afford to have an archive? How do we preserve objects that are interchangeable in their value? What role may an artist play in this memory practice?
Team: Lilit Matevosyan, Gulshat Gubaidullina, V-L-V-SH-M-D, Vladimir Seleznev, Katya Selezneva, and Irina Denkmann
Curator: Irina Denkmann
Design: Denis (Gafiyatullin) Volkov
Illustration: Gulshat Gubaidullina, Denis (Gafiyatullin) Volkov
Partners: World Design Capital 2026, Exhibition Space Alte Schmelze