“Small Pains, Great Songs”

PASAJ İstanbul’s project “Small Pains, Great Songs,” launched in 2024, will be presented to art audiences at Maison Magi from 2–15 April 2026.

The exhibition brings together a unique collection of artists’ books created by sixty artists, each small enough to fit in the palm of one’s hand. Though modest in scale, these books carry traces of the artists’ personal struggles, inner fractures, and imaginative worlds. Shaped through distinct aesthetic languages and modes of expression, the works hold powerful emotions and compelling narratives within a compact form.

Conceived by Seçil Yaylalı, one of PASAJ’s founding members, the project approaches the artist’s book as a free and autonomous space of expression. It invites artists to make their practices visible through a small-scale, concentrated, and deeply personal format.

The title of the project is drawn from a section in Theodor W. Adorno’s Minima Moralia, itself inspired by Heinrich Heine’s line, “Out of my great sorrows I make little songs.” In this context, the exhibition reflects on the transformation of profound pain into small-scale works of art, while revealing the traces of the artists’ inner reckonings and creative transformations.

The books featured in the exhibition were produced by each artist as part of a series, in editions of no more than nine copies. The project’s production partner is Barın Bindery Workshop, where some of the books were hand-bound by skilled craftspeople. In this respect, the project also reflects PASAJ İstanbul’s approach to developing works that engage with processes of making through relationships between place, craftsmanship, and collaboration.