The “Vessel of Love” forms the heart of the festival: a place for encounters, conversations, concerts, performances and lectures. Inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”, HAU1 becomes a vessel for diverse voices, stories and perspectives.
At the centre of the “Vessel” is a large-scale work painted on fabric by the Afghan artist Kubra Khademi titled “Where Ahriman Whispers…” (2026), created specifically for this space. Khademi works as a performer and visual artist, and her work explores patriarchal violence, female self-determination, bodies and resistance. Her art is shaped by her experience of growing up as a woman in Afghanistan and later being forced into exile. Her works combine personal experiences with mythological and political imagery, transforming the female body into a site of resistance and self-empowerment.
The “Vessel of Love” is conceived as a space for resistance, care and connection – a place for stories, voices and experiences, and for exploring how, in an increasingly heartless world, we can care for one another and imagine different futures.
About the painting in the “Vessel”, Khademi says: “In the ancient cosmology of the Persian world next to Buddha of Bamiyan (today in central Afghanistan), the spirit Ahriman is associated with darkness, destruction, deception, and the forces that move against life. But darkness does not always arrive as a visible monster. Sometimes it whispers. It enters through fear, obedience, silence, violence, and the stories we inherit about who we are allowed to become. My work returns to the mythological landscape of Persia and Khorasan, not as an attempt to reconstruct the past, but to disturb it. I enter the ancient world of dragons, heroes, demons, and battles through my own body, questioning who has historically been given the right to occupy the position of the hero. The dragon becomes a manifestation of what must be confronted. It carries the accumulated violence of patriarchal power, religious authority, political oppression, and the silencing of women. Yet the woman confronting it is not the passive figure waiting for salvation. She takes the sword. She enters the battle. She becomes the dragon-slayer.”
