Yazan Khalili’s We carry our pain like a language is made up of thirty-nine caps offered for sale. Each cap is embroidered with a fragment of a poetic text. As people buy, wear, and carry the caps beyond the exhibition, the poem disperses across different bodies and places. The poem resists a single, complete transmission. No viewer can read it from beginning to end or fully grasp it at once. Instead, it can be read only through wearing, proximity, and accumulation.

Extending the lineage of concrete and spatial poetry, Khalili replaces the page with the crowd as the site where the poem takes shape. The logic of consumption and circulation extends to large language models trained to predict and flatten text into statistically likely fragments. Against these logics, the poem carries pain, land, inheritance, and testimony in a form that resists extraction.

Proceeds from cap sales are directed toward grassroots cultural initiatives operating outside institutional funding structures. The poem’s dispersal therefore doubles as an act of redistribution. Rather than remaining a complete whole, the work is designed to disappear over time. Its disappearance embodies the poem’s resistance to institutional, national, and algorithmic frameworks.