Mahalla Kimiya-The Alchemist's assembly

Under the title KĪMIYĀ-The Alchemist’s Assembly this year’s Festival edition calls for collective transformation grounded in care, material practice, and ethical responsibility. Drawing on kīmiyāas a transregional tradition of working with matter, healing, and communal knowledge, the festival brings together contemporary artistic practices with historical sites, artisanal expertise, and civic contexts—treating each as an active contributor to artistic production.

The festival invites participants to resist an ongoing dystopian reality marked by fragmented access to human rights, gender apartheid, and the precarisation of the global majority. It also calls also for the inclusion of non-human existenceswithin the assembly—beings and environments whose presence demands responsibility, attention, and care.

Mahalla will focus on collaborative artistic practices. Artists are invited to engage with the space and its communities, and with each other—specifically including artists from crisis regions through long-distance remote labs, enabling shared work across borders, conditions, and limitations.

Alchemy as a transcultural practice of transformation

The term alchemyderives from the Arabic al-kīmiyā (الكيمياء), commonly traced to the ancient Egyptian khem—“black earth,” referring to the fertile soil of the Nile—and the Greek chymeia, meaning “pouring together” or “mixing.” Across antiquity and the medieval period, kīmiyā emerged as a transregional field of knowledge concerned with transformation: of matter, health, and ethical balance.

Artistic practicePositioning itself against extractive cultural logics, Mahalla Kīmiyā proposes artistic practice as an alternative economy of value—one that prioritizes continuity over accumulation and circulation over ownership. In dialogue with theories of the commons, the festival treats cultural production as a form of commoning: temporary shared spaces where value is produced and sustained through participation and care.

In this sense, alchemy becomes a contemporary metaphor for ethical artistic practice—transformation not as control, but as correspondence, responsibility, and care within entangled material worlds.Mahalla Kīmiyā is dedicated to artistic practices that engage with vulnerability, exclusion, and invisibility—not as weakness, but as a starting point for transformation and collective strength. Inspired by kīmiyā as a tradition of working with matter, healing, and shared knowledge, the festival invites artists to explore how value, care, and belonging can be rethought through material and collaborative practice.Taking place in the historical setting of Istanbul, including spaces such as Büyük Valide Han, Mahalla Kīmiyā encourages site-specific interventions that respond to layered architectures, artisanal knowledge, and civic contexts as active elements of artistic production.Social and geographical borders, gendered violence, and extractive relationships to nature continue to shape dystopian realities. Mahalla Kīmiyā responds by creating an assembly for rethinking: a space where artists and collaborators develop new narratives, material propositions, and experimental formats grounded in care and responsibility.Artists are free to work in any medium or style. Innovative interpretations of the leitmotif are welcome—especially those that approach transformation as a shared and ethical practice.