Two screens.

One history, two speeds.

What is said—and what is lived.

MAVİ started from a question about who gets to narrate history and who has to live with its consequences. The work explores Azerbaijan’s post-Soviet transformation through archival footage, post-Soviet Azerbaijani cinema, personal recollections and recordings of weddings from the 1990s. Public narratives and mass media meet lived experience, emotional memory and everyday life across historical change.

Instead of constructing a single account of the past, MAVİ attends to the gaps between what is publicly recorded and what remains within private memory. Images repeat, interrupt and respond to one another, forming a fragmented archive in which historical time becomes personal and unstable.

MAVİ also develops through public readings of essays from Abdullayev’s archive. At Städelschule Rundgang, Frankfurt am Main, on 6–7 February 2026, texts were read by Ege P. Aktepe, Leonardo Zeine Mendes de Souza, Mara Aiko, Mari Kalabegashvili, Mariam Guledani and Pia Chakraverti-Würthwein. A later reading, MAVİ Has Seen Everything, was presented by Ege P. Aktepe, Dina Helene Leber and Kara Bukowski during the opening of bonds, the Städelschule Graduate Show at Trianon, Frankfurt am Main, on 10 July 2026.