YARAT Contemporary Art Space is pleased to announce "Soft Language", an exhibition curated by multidisciplinary artist Leyli Alakbarova at YAY Gallery. Bringing together local and international artists, the exhibition explores the expressive intelligence of materials, how fiber, thread, and other materials communicate through softness, repetition, and touch rather than words.

Soft Language gathers textile, and mixed media works that form a quiet yet resonant dialogue through material. These pieces, some intimate in scale, draw the viewer inward, offering sensitivity as a form of strength. Their presence emerges through care, patience, and the physicality of the hand. The exhibition features women artists whose practices traverse tactile, earth-bound materiality and vivid expression. This interplay unfolds as a shifting field, tracing relationships between craft and contemporary art, tradition and immediacy, permanence and transformation. Historically gendered techniques - textile, repetition, and hand processes that are reimagined as sites of knowledge, inheritance, and renewal.

The exhibition unfolds through each room, where muted, earthy works – crafted from natural fibers and grounded in restrained tones – evoke a sense of land, memory, and slow, non-industrial making, while vivid colors and manufactured textures introduce a heightened intensity that reflects the excess and urgency of contemporary experience.
Throughout the exhibition, wool, silk, cotton, metal, paper, and manufactured materials intertwine, where each carrying traces of labor, geography, and cultural memory. Placed together, they create a network of quiet correspondences, offering material as a shared language connecting bodies, histories, and worlds.

Soft Language invites visitors into a space of listening: to sense how matters, feels, and remembers. It is an exhibition about the pressure of softness and the fragility of strength, where every thread, surface, and color hold both individuality and connection.

Participating artists: Jala Aziz, Leyli Alakbarova, Kirra Kusy, Lea Sun, Charlotte Nordgren Sewell, Barbara Garcia, Alexia Lleonart, Agustina Fioretti, Madison Katrina Flood, Nora Sarlak, Lisa Mur, Paulina Lagos Burgos, Silke Spitzer, Anna Ariu, Sara Heidary, Lena Bonsack, Julie Peter, Felicitas Wasner, Melissa Dorn, Teresa Puig, Cristina Reid.

About curator: Leyli Alakbarova is a multidisciplinary artist based in Baku, Azerbaijan, working across textile, photography, film, and installation. She holds a Master’s degree in Textile from Escola Massana in Barcelona. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in Baku, the Museum of Azerbaijani Painting XX–XXI Centuries, the Baku Railway Museum, and Gazelli Art House and her short films were screened at Loop Festival City Screen in Barcelona. Her curatorial approach extends her artistic practice, exploring women’s narratives, fragility, and intergenerational memory through a dialogue between artists and materials.