Representations of state power have historically tended towards the figurative—of barons, kings, merchants, and their lackeys. In traditional portraiture, the ideology of a sitter is discernible through the codes of their dress and the objects placed around them: characterisable, more generally, as ornamentation. It was perhaps not until Max Ernst’s painting L’Ange du Foyer (1937) that ideology itself was freed from the coded site of ornamentation and given formal prominence through Surrealist figuration. Ernst rendered fascism as a chimeric beast with an annihilating appetite, obliterating both itself and the landscape before it. For transmediale 2025, Hamishi Farah presents a painting that extends from the history of Western portraiture and its depictions of the ruling classes and their ideologies.

Programmed by Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung and commissioned by transmediale 2025, Farah's portrait queries the point at which the racial dialectic in painting approaches an ideological limit or exhausts itself, questioning what political possibilities remain in contemporary portraiture.

Untitled (2025) by Hamishi Farah was presented on stage for the duration of Tobi Haslett’s lecture in a manner agreed to by all parties on 01 February 2025. We are pleased to have been able to host this project as part of the festival and stand in support of its aim of raising critical questions of the current German context. More on the project can be read at Triple Canopy, here .