Around twenty participants sit at long tables. The class opens with a warm-up — activating the hands, then learning to look at a face, pairing off to study the specific geography of someone else's upper lip. Charcoal is introduced: sticks made from branches collected in Kashmir since 2017, when Agat and Tekin began the research for this project. Still recognisably wood, and no longer alive — a medium, Agat tells the class, suited to things that are neither fully present nor fully gone.
The drawing begins with participants' own hands: tracing the outline, then following its contours again and again in charcoal, attention kept not on the mark being made but on the point where the charcoal touches skin.
Threaded through the exercises is the story of Javed, a drawing teacher who disappeared from Kashmir in 2001 — and of Agat, also a drawing teacher, encountering that disappearance from the outside, without ever having been to Kashmir himself. Javed appears and reappears across the drawings, telling Agat about his life in fragments, evading only the question of where he is.
Around Javed's disappearance, his mother's search unfolds in three threads. A braid-cutting: a friend of Javed's, the 400th recorded victim in a wave of unexplained attacks, whose braid is found coiled like a snake at the scene. A hand-embroidered map, made as occupational therapy for mothers of the disappeared, in which a single rule — no gaps allowed — starts to break down as holes appear in the fabric, tracing the exact locations tied to Javed's disappearance. And a homemade chemistry experiment, undertaken by Javed and his friend Yusuf in a basement, that produces something smelling, unaccountably, of apricots.
The class closes at the river Neelam, where mothers of the disappeared gather on opposite banks to call out names across the water, throwing almonds toward the other side in the faint hope that a son might be close enough to hear his own name spoken. Participants are invited to leave their drawings on the wall of the space, to be seen — and drawn from — by the next class.
Drawing the Face of the Disappeared Persons sits with enforced disappearance in Kashmir through the specific, entangled story of one teacher, one family, and one search — asking what a drawn face can and cannot hold as evidence, and what it means to keep looking anyway, without an answer.
Structured as a real drawing class — charcoal, warm-up exercises, and instruction — participants draw their own hands and, through repetition, are drawn into Javed's story, adding their pages to an accumulating wall of drawings left behind for future classes to encounter.
The show was first developed during a workshop at DAS Theatre, later developed with Yunus Bilir and Julia van der Putten for Amsterdam Fringe Festival as Absent Academy with Sipan Sezgin Tekin and presented here is a version developed as part of a residency at W139 based on an invitaiton by Claudio Ritfeld