Geste Paris 8th Edition Presents: Nomad's Breath
Co-curated by Lexïng Zhang and Amber Terranova
10th of November 2025 / 6th of December 2025
GESTE Paris, 10 rue Croix des Petits Champs, Paris 75001
FARID RASULOV, ALMAGUL MENLIBAYEVA, MAAYA WAKASUGI, MAMALI SHAFAHI, ROBERTA MARROQUIN, STEVE MCCURRY, JON MCCORMACK, HEATHER MATTERA, LYNDA DRAPER, FANSACK, JULIETTE SOMNOLET
In an age shaped as much by excess as by absence, Nomad’s Breath gathers twelve artists whose works move like a traveler’s exhale: light, resonant, connective. This exhibition frames nomadism not as rootlessness, but as a way of breathing with the world: exchanging presence, story and shelter rather than possessions. Generosity is unmeasured; it lives in the smallest gestures. A glance across distance, a note of song, the hush of shared silence. The nomad breathes in rhythm with the landscapes they cross, offering whatever they hold — salt, song, solace — to those they meet.
Nomad’s Breath positions nomadism as a living knowledge system rather than metaphor. For centuries, nomadic peoples have developed lifeways rooted in reciprocity and adaptability, cultivating ecological wisdom and exchange practices that ensure their survival across shifting terrains. These traditions remind us that to travel lightly is not to live with less, but to live with more intention — where acts of giving and receiving strengthen the bonds of community.
Rituals pulse throughout the exhibition as counterweights to modern discontinuity. Works span the raw immediacy of photojournalism to the atmospheric depth of conceptual art, revealing both traces of resilience and rituals that sustain life on the move. They give shape to thresholds—arrivals and departures, partings and reunions — and knit community across time. As philosopher Byung-Chul Han observed, “Rituals give form to the essential transitions of life.” They are a form of closure. Without them, we drift untethered. Within Nomad’s Breath, ritual is reframed as a practice of care: a way of weaving meaning from breath, pattern and memory.
The pandemic years sharpened this awareness. With contact curtailed, many realized how little one needs to live — yet how vital connection is. In parallel, interest in “digital nomadism” surged. Nomad’s Breath links such currents to lifeways honed over millennia — worldviews grounded in reciprocity, ecological intelligence and hospitality.
Presented in two chapters — Dematerialization and Sacred Nature — the exhibition moves from the lightness of portable culture and acts of generosity to the deep cosmological ties between people and place. Together, these works invite us to imagine futures sustained less by accumulation and control than by reciprocity, welcome and partnership.
In an era dominated by artificial intelligence and digital pervasiveness, Nomad’s Breath invites visitors to step into an analogue and handcrafted world of visual and emotional intensity.
Chapter I: Dematerialization
Nomadic material culture is defined by lightness: objects are small, precious and portable — made to be carried, repaired and shared. Every surplus is perishable and best given away. To dematerialize is not to lose but to affirm what matters most can’t be owned: gratitude, recognition and the gestures of welcome that sustain communities.
This spirit shapes the first chapter, where artists transform the gallery into a shared habitat of generosity and exchange. Farid Rasulov’s The Caravanserai of Generosity reimagines the space as a caravanserai, its walls and ceiling draped in Azerbaijani textiles. The term caravanserai refers to the roadside inns that once welcomed travellers along the Silk Road. Places of rest, exchange and cultural encounter. They supported the flow of commerce and stories across Asia, North Africa and Southeast Europe, embodying hospitality as a moral and spiritual act. Within this minimal, multifunctional structure, fabric becomes shelter, furniture and ornament; inviting visitors to experience nomadic life first-hand. Here, kindness and generosity are as vital as form itself — an ethos echoed in the exhibition’s public program.
Around this centerpiece, Maaya Wakasugi evokes the ancient belief that to live fully is to practice art. His new work, The Memory of the Flag, draws on the Chinese character “遊” — meaning “to wander” or “to play” — from the word “遊牧民”, “nomad.” Through ink, acrylic and metallic pigment, Wakasugi reinterprets the image of a fluttering flag once believed to carry a spirit. He transforms it into a symbol of the modern nomad’s invisible banner: one of connection, culture and movement.
Completing the first chapter, Mamali Shafahi channels the lyricism of Persian poetry, and Roberta Marroquin photographs the quiet contentment of Bhutanese life. Together, these gestures dissolve boundaries between ornament and philosophy, object and offering — reminding us that the lightest touch can carry the deepest meaning.
Chapter II: Sacred Nature
If Dematerialization considers what can be carried, Sacred Nature turns to what sustains. Nomadic peoples have long lived in partnership with their environments, reading seasonal cycles and adapting with resilience. Their cosmologies teach that storms pass, springs return and endings give rise to beginnings. Here, artists explore nature as collaborator — through works revealing continuity, renewal and transformation.
At its heart, Almagul Menlibayeva presents Transoxiana Dreams, a photographic and light-box installation set around the once-flourishing Aral Sea, now a desert known as the Aralkum. Seen through the eyes of a fisherman’s daughter, it fuses myth and memory as she watches her home transform into an arid expanse haunted by hybrid centaur figures drawn from legend. These works merge folklore, ecological loss and resilience into a hypnotic visual mythology of survival and renewal.
Around this, other artists trace humanity’s dialogue with landscape and belief: Jon McCormack photographs the Maasai community in Kenya, capturing gestures of quiet resilience and kinship; Heather Mattera draws from the Icelandic landscape, where geothermal light and mist evoke the meeting of elemental and spiritual forces; Lynda Draper shapes dream-like ceramic relics; Fansack reflects Tibetan Buddhism’s sacred peaks; and Juliette Somnolet transforms obsolete windows into emblems. Together, they offer a vision of sacred ecology — an invitation to live attentively, attuned to nature’s rhythm.
Nomad’s Breath is more than an exhibition. It is a living practice.
In its installations, films, photographs and calligraphy, we are asked not only to look but to inhabit. To pause in a yurt, to gather at a shared table, to listen for echoes of ritual and song. The works urge us to inhale deeply and listen, to live lightly, hospitably and in deeper partnership with the world that sustains us.
The question lingers for each visitor: Are we nomad yet?