Untitled Might Be the Most Honest Label of All: A Heart-to-Heart with Ghada Kunash on Seeing Art Before Origin

Captured Zeitgeist | VOLTA Basel 2025 | By Tallulah Patricia Bär

In an art economy driven by context—origin stories, labels, trauma narratives—what happens when someone proposes removing all of it?

That was the quiet yet radical provocation offered by Ghada Kunash, Founder and Managing Director of El Fann A Porter, during The Geopolitics of the Art Market, a panel I moderated at VOLTA Basel 2025. The panel itself was part of VOLTA’s critically attuned programming under Lee Cavaliere, who has positioned the fair not just as a art marketplace, but as a cultivating ground for new ways of seeing and connecting.

Ghada's question was simple, but its implications were not:

“What if we stopped telling people where the artist is from—at least at first?What if we allowed the artwork to speak before we tell it how to be read?”

It wasn’t a plea for erasure. It was an appeal for reordering: let the aesthetic encounter precede the geopolitical biography. Let meaning emerge before classification.

A Lens That Distorts Before It Reveals

Ghada, at VOLTA for the first time, described how audiences would visibly recoil when they heard the words “Middle East.” Not because of what the art said—but because of what they assumed it meant.

“They hear where we’re from, and that becomes the entire frame,” she told me.“Before they’ve even seen the work, they’ve decided how to feel about it.”

Related Artist of El Fann A Porter Gallery

El Fann A Porter presented a rich, personal, and regionally diverse selection of artists:

• Khaled Jarada, a Paris-based Palestinian

• Syrian artists Rabee Kiwan, Majd Kurdieh, Ahmad Jamil Kasha, and Omran Younis

Each brings layered aesthetic language, poetic rigor, and political subtlety. But too often, Kunash noted, the region they come from overshadows the artistic integrity of their work.

“A painting is a personal impression—a feeling made visible. It deserves to be seen first as that—not as a geopolitical event.”

Her empathetic frustration wasn’t with viewers, but with a system that primes people to look for conflict before composition. To view “Middle Eastern art” as either resistance or recovery, never simply expression.

War as Asset Class

The conversation quickly shifted to a more uncomfortable truth: the commodification of crisis. Ghada pointed to a rising trend among collectors acquiring what she called “art of war”—particularly Syrian works.

“There’s a growing appetite for work from places like Syria,” she explained.“ But not always because it moves people—because it might gain value. Because it’s tied to war.”

War becomes a provenance. Suffering becomes a certificate of potential return. The artist’s experience is absorbed as aesthetic texture, but also as speculative collateral.

“Where is the valuation of the work itself—without these externalities?” she asked.“Are we buying art—or just narrative?”

This isn’t just an ethical dilemma. It’s a market distortion. When trauma becomes trend, the artistic value of the work itself is at risk of being hollowed out—its significance reduced to the echo of pain it represents.

Can We Have an “Untitled” Pavilion?

Out of this critique emerged an idea—part provocation, part curatorial experiment: the Untitled Pavilion.

“No artist names. No countries. No labels,” Ghada Kunash suggested.“ You walk into the space, and all you know is what you feel.”

It sounds improbable. But the deeper the conversation went, the more it became clear: this isn’t about removing identity—it’s about delaying the presentation of it. Let the viewer connect without preloading the experience with the politics of place.

“Of course we’ll tell you who the artist is, where they’re from, what inspires them,” she added.“But let that come after. Let it be a second step—not the entry point.”

Ghada called it “radical hospitality.” An invitation to meet the work as human expression first—before the systems of classification take over.

Framing the Frame

The critique was never aimed at VOLTA itself—if anything, VOLTA’s willingness to host this conversation proves its value as a fair rooted in critical engagement, not just commerce.

The MENA Pavilion, where El Fann A Porter was featured, is a case in point. It exists to make underrepresented regions visible. And yet Kunash’s reflections point to the double bind it creates: visibility through the lens of otherness.

“It’s not that I’m against the MENA category,” she clarified.“But if people stop at the category, they might miss the soul of the work.”

This is where Lee Cavaliere’s curatorial intelligence shines. By designing VOLTA not just as a platform but as a space for uncomfortable but generative dialogue, he allows these tensions to surface without collapsing into spectacle or defensiveness.

Between Strategic Framing and Radical Encounter

Ghada isn’t rejecting market participation with this view. But she's actively engaged with thinking about navigating it, critically and carefully. Her gallery, positioned between contemporary Arab expression and international resonance, doesn’t run from identity—it just refuses to perform it on command.

What she proposes instead is a different kind of sequencing. Not anti-identity. But post-instrumental.

“Let people see the work, feel something, and then—if they care to—ask where it came from.Don’t prime them with a narrative. Let the work stand.”

It’s a call to curatorial integrity in an age of marketing masquerading as representation.

A performance at the MENA Pavillion by Georges Yammine at Le Lab Booth

In the End: What Are We Really Looking At?

As VOLTA drew to a close, Ghada Kunash’s question remained:

If we took away the labels—would the work still move you?If not, what exactly were you valuing?

Her proposition may be unorthodox, but it’s honest. In a market saturated with strategic framing, it asks us to return to something more vulnerable, more essential:

Presence.

VOLTA gave the platform.

Kunash gave the provocation.

Now the rest depends on how we choose to see—and what we’re willing to unsee first.