Rebel-Ist-hah!

Rebel-Ist-hah! is a performance art collective founded in 2006 in Iran, active across borders until forced into exile in Germany in 2022. It creates performative acts that make space for witnessing the erased, the undocumented, and the forbidden. Through hybrid formats, performative interventions, and collective creation, the group challenges dominant narratives and reclaims public space as a terrain of resistance. Rebel-Ist-hah! treats performance as a form of activism—where memory resists forgetting, and witnessing becomes a shared, political act. Rather than staging representation, their work invites presence: temporary zones where bodies, silences and histories converge. In exile, the collective continues to cultivate practices that hold space for what has been made invisible—and for those who refuse to look away.