“I believe that there has never been a time when free thought has been as threatened as it is today, not only in openly repressive regimes, but increasingly in societies that once called themselves open and tolerant. I am a writer from South Africa, a country where citizens were confined to strictly demarcated racial ghettos that were called, without irony, ethnic ‘homelandsʻ and yet were anything but home. I left South Africa in the mid-1970s when my poems and other books were banned by the apartheid regime. Many of us believed that the end of apartheid would bring a measure of freedom and in a way it did – and then again it didn’t.

The government of the new South Africa is planning to suppress freedom of expression under the pretext of combating ‘hate speechʻ. The proposed censorship promises to be just as absurd and draconian as that of the old regime. So we are all too familiar with it. If this law is passed, a ‘wrongʻ word, whether spoken or written, could land you behind bars for years. Writers will no longer dare to say what they think, but if they no longer say what they think, their texts will end up in the back of a drawer or they will wander into an inner exile that is just as lonely as the loss of home. It is a privilege to be the patron of the Days of Exile 2024. It is said that writers are natural exiles with a tendency to loneliness. But exile is difficult, heartbreaking, even deadly, and yet more familiar than ever. It is wonderful to be a small part of a larger movement that sees and supports those who are far from home, and I believe that there has never been a time when free thought has been as threatened as it is today, not only in openly repressive regimes, but increasingly in societies that once called themselves open and tolerant.

I am a writer from South Africa, a country where citizens were confined to strictly demarcated racial ghettos that were called, without irony, ethnic ‘homelands’ and yet were anything but home. I left South Africa in the mid-1970s when my poems and other books were banned by the apartheid regime. Many of us believed that the end of apartheid would bring a measure of freedom and in a way it did – and then again it didn’t. The government of the new South Africa is planning to suppress freedom of expression under the pretext of combating ‘hate speechʻ. The proposed censorship promises to be just as absurd and draconian as that of the old regime. So we are all too familiar with it. If this law is passed, a ‘wrongʻ word, whether spoken or written, could land you behind bars for years. Writers will no longer dare to say what they think, but if they no longer say what they think, their texts will end up in the back of a drawer or they will wander into an inner exile that is just as lonely as the loss of home.

It is a privilege to be the patron of the Days of Exile 2024. It is said that writers are natural exiles with a tendency to loneliness. But exile is difficult, heartbreaking, even deadly, and yet more familiar than ever. It’s wonderful to be a small part of a larger movement that sees and supports those who are far from home.”

The Iranian artist and poet Farkhondeh Shahroudi has designed the key visual for the Days of Exile in Bonn and the cover of this programme booklet. Born in Tehran in 1962, she fled Iran as a young woman. Her journey took her via France and Belgium to exile in Germany in 1990. Here she spent several years in Dortmund and also studied. Today, the artist lives and works in Berlin.

Shahroudi’s artistic work has been honoured several times. In 2022 she received the Hannah Höch Förderpreis and in 2023 the Exile Visual Arts Award from the Körber Foundation. In 2024, she received a scholarship for the International Studio & Curatorial Programme (ISCP) in New York, sponsored by the Goethe-Institut. Her artworks are characterised by a profound exploration of themes such as exile and displacement.

She uses a variety of materials and media, combining fine art, craft, graphics and poetry. Shahroudi’s use of handwriting, sewing and interweaving various materials, as in the expansive work ‘Two’ in the key visual, results in impressive works. These hover between the social and the asocial, the political and the private, the public and the intimate, the inside and the outside, between comprehensibility and illegibility.