Sour Things

Sour Things, an exhibition by Jerusalem-born artist Mirna Bamieh, is the inaugural season of ICA’s new artistic research program Lightless Fires (2024–26), seeking fermentation as a figure and technique of collective memory, autonomous archiving, and writing history. Bamieh reflects on the process of fermentation through a body of work entitled Sour Things, which incorporates text, ceramics, drawings, sound, and video into site-specific installations. Thus far taking shape as a market, kitchen, and pantry, Sour Things comprises models of domesticity made in response to the specific socio-political conditions in Palestine that have displaced Bamieh. She asks if and how can one practice preservation while residing in liminality, while being in-between? To practice fermentation, one needs to inhabit a place, but perhaps preservation can be practiced anywhere?