OSLO – Eliyah Mesayer: The Speaker’s Room

The Speaker’s Room brings Eliyah Mesayer’s imaginary state Illiyeen back to Den Frie in a shadow version of a state office, displacing the architecture of power from the political to the poetic.

Eliyah Mesayer’s artistic practice balances on the threshold between reality and fiction. Across installation, performance, and poetry, she materialises and intertwines historical facts with fiction in dreamy manifestations. Her ongoing project Illiyeen originates from a Bedouin expression referring to a celestial register in which the deeds of the righteous are recorded and preserved; in Mesayer’s practice, this is transformed into an allegorical state beyond geographic and national boundaries. From this point, she unfolds a fictional and poetic world-building in which imagination functions as a method for examining how power is formed, distributed, and represented.

In The Speaker’s Room, Illiyeen is conjured as a state office stripped of real-political function, with architecture reduced to texture, shadows, and absence. Familiar symbols of authority dissolve through subtle shifts, leaving behind an abandoned room in which another form of national narrative emerges: one not held together by shared identity, national boundaries, or authoritative symbols, but by collective and dreamlike imaginaries of community.

Mesayer has previously exhibited at Den Frie as part of Den Frie Morgen (2020) and Bad Timing – Or How to Write History without Objects (2023). The exhibition in OSLO thus continues Den Frie’s curatorial ambition of recurring collaborations with artists.