Fragile Archive Effectve Ties

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Fomo Art Space,  Zurich

26.09-24.10. 2025

Long Tongue, Old Song
Woven fabric scraps, artificial nails, 2025.

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In her site-specific installation for FOMO, Seda Hepsev draws from feminist writer Elizabeth Fisher’s Carrier Bag Theory of Evolution. Rejecting the patriarchal narrative that positions the weapon as humanity’s first tool, Fisher argued instead that the bag—used to gather, carry, and store food and materials—was the central invention for human survival, making women the first inventors in the hunter-gatherer phase. In her work, Hepsev foregrounds women’s role in carrying food and materials, a labor long omitted from histories written through heroes, inventions, and progress. As she notes, dismissing the bag as “just a container, nothing worth mentioning” merely extends this patriarchal narrative.

In Long Tongue, Old Song, Hepsev reclaims the collectivity of the bag  by creating a large figure woven from fabric scraps—a sculptural body, part monster and part creature, whose form may suggest masculinity yet, for her, is unmistakably female. Unlike the controlled ideals of art history, this figure leans back against the wall at ease, as if slowly expanding and growing larger, carrying within it the stories embedded in the fabrics. By contrast, smaller textile images referencing masculine-coded bodies appear weaker and more ordinary around the sculptural body. Through this tension, Hepsev exposes the invisibility of women’s contributions and reframes culture itself as a carrier bag—a vessel that holds silenced, distorted and biased histories. 

Elif Carrier, from the exhibition text. 

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Installation photos: Anna Maysuk