This two-part program puts the weird, dark, supernatural, and fantastical at center stage.
It looks at how these often under-explored modes of the strange narrate complex historical, geopolitical, and socio-cultural realities, while opening an imaginary world of speculation and possibility. Through the enchanted otherworldliness of the spirit world, expanding universes, understated dread, and the coming to life of that what should remain petrified, these films not only mash up conceptions of time and space, but also blur the boundaries between human and nonhuman, life and nonlife.
The works in the program travel through colonial pasts, extractivist presents, and improbable futures, rendering time and geography fluid and haunted. Landscapes, in the form of forests, waterways, deserts and mountains, become animate. While there is always a suggestion of looming catastrophe and implied violence lurking underneath, there is also an immense sense of potential. A grain of sand slumbers in the mountain’s belly, patiently waiting to transform into something else.
By drawing on folklore, mythology, science, and the intricate entanglements between deep geological time and human historical time, these artists and filmmakers address topical issues such as dispossession, migration, protracted political, and resource extraction. Here dead matter morphs into live matter, ghosts slip into reverie, disquiet awakens desire, and fabulation destabilizes rigid belief systems.
Curated by Nat Muller
Infinite Nectar, Hera Büyüktaşcıyan, Turkey, 2019, 11 min.
English
Synopsis:
Daal dus khaan shehar lahore e ander
Bai kinnein boohey tay kinnian barian nein
Naley Das Khaan aothon dian ittaan
Kinnian tuttian tay kinnian saaran nein
Daal dus khaan shehr Lahore e Andar
Khooian kinnian mithian tey kinnian khaarian nein
Tell me, in the city of Lahore
How many doors and windows are there?
Tell me also about its bricks.
How many are still firm, and how many lie broken?
Tell me, inside the city of Lahore
How many wells have fresh water and how many are ruined with salt?
Infinite Nectar draws on the poetics of space by exploring abandoned Sikh heritage buildings in the city of Lahore (Pakistan). These spaces carry traces of the 1947 Partition of India and have been resilient in the face of power shifts, urban transformations and cycles of trauma throughout history. The artist unfolds these layers through the textures, architectural juxtapositions, and cracks within these spaces, overlaying them with animated mosaic-like stones and caressing them with a fragmented marble hand of Maharani Jindan Kaur, the last empress of the Sikh Empire and a revolutionary female character, who returns back to her place of origin and haunts the city like a ghost. The video invokes the cyclical movement of time, memory and human presence in these spatial palimpsests. It refers to the representation of memory by creating a series of mirrorings through the lost and found elements of spaces that have become the embodiment of the invisible.
Image credit: Infinite Nectar, Hera Büyüktaşcıyan. Lahore 2019. Image Courtesy: The artist and Green Art Gallery Dubai
The piece has been produced as a part of the 2nd Lahore Biennale 2020 in curatorial collaboration with Hajra Haider Karrar and supported by SAHA Association Supporting Contemporary Art From Turkey, National College of Arts Lahore and LUMS Gurmani Center for Languages and Literature
*The piece has been produced as a part of the 2nd Lahore Biennale 2020 in curatorial collaboration with Hajra Haider Karrar and supported by SAHA Association Supporting Contemporary Art From Turkey, National College of Arts Lahore and LUMS Gurmani Center for Languages and Literature
Hera Büyüktaşçıyan (b.1984 Istanbul, Turkey). In her multidisciplinary practice, Büyüktaşcıyan unfolds ways in which memory, identity, and knowledge are shaped by deeply ingrained yet constantly evolving waves of history. The artist often references mythology and theology, as well as specific architectural structures as the foundation for her works, closely observing their genealogies and the ways in which they shift and evolve over time. Through her site specific interventions, sculptures, drawings and films, Büyüktaşcıyan dives into terrestrial imagination by unearthing patterns of selected narratives and timelines that unfold the material memory of unstable spaces.
Selected exhibitions include:14th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2023); Ancestral Weavings, Tate Modern, London (2022); Matter of Art Biennale, Prague (2022); New Museum Triennial, New York (2021); 3rd Autostrada Biennial, Kosovo (2021); 2nd Lahore Biennial, Pakistan (2020); 6th Singapore Biennial, Singapore (2019); 1st Inaugural Toronto Biennale, Canada (2019); Gigantisme, FRAC, Dunkirk (2019); ifa Galerie, Berlin (2019); EVA International Ireland's Biennale, Limerick (2016); 56th Venice Biennale National Pavilion of Armenia, Italy (2015); Jerusalem Show VII (2014).
- Year2019
- Runtime10:55
- LanguageEnglish
- CountryTurkey
This two-part program puts the weird, dark, supernatural, and fantastical at center stage.
It looks at how these often under-explored modes of the strange narrate complex historical, geopolitical, and socio-cultural realities, while opening an imaginary world of speculation and possibility. Through the enchanted otherworldliness of the spirit world, expanding universes, understated dread, and the coming to life of that what should remain petrified, these films not only mash up conceptions of time and space, but also blur the boundaries between human and nonhuman, life and nonlife.
The works in the program travel through colonial pasts, extractivist presents, and improbable futures, rendering time and geography fluid and haunted. Landscapes, in the form of forests, waterways, deserts and mountains, become animate. While there is always a suggestion of looming catastrophe and implied violence lurking underneath, there is also an immense sense of potential. A grain of sand slumbers in the mountain’s belly, patiently waiting to transform into something else.
By drawing on folklore, mythology, science, and the intricate entanglements between deep geological time and human historical time, these artists and filmmakers address topical issues such as dispossession, migration, protracted political, and resource extraction. Here dead matter morphs into live matter, ghosts slip into reverie, disquiet awakens desire, and fabulation destabilizes rigid belief systems.
Curated by Nat Muller
Infinite Nectar, Hera Büyüktaşcıyan, Turkey, 2019, 11 min.
English
Synopsis:
Daal dus khaan shehar lahore e ander
Bai kinnein boohey tay kinnian barian nein
Naley Das Khaan aothon dian ittaan
Kinnian tuttian tay kinnian saaran nein
Daal dus khaan shehr Lahore e Andar
Khooian kinnian mithian tey kinnian khaarian nein
Tell me, in the city of Lahore
How many doors and windows are there?
Tell me also about its bricks.
How many are still firm, and how many lie broken?
Tell me, inside the city of Lahore
How many wells have fresh water and how many are ruined with salt?
Infinite Nectar draws on the poetics of space by exploring abandoned Sikh heritage buildings in the city of Lahore (Pakistan). These spaces carry traces of the 1947 Partition of India and have been resilient in the face of power shifts, urban transformations and cycles of trauma throughout history. The artist unfolds these layers through the textures, architectural juxtapositions, and cracks within these spaces, overlaying them with animated mosaic-like stones and caressing them with a fragmented marble hand of Maharani Jindan Kaur, the last empress of the Sikh Empire and a revolutionary female character, who returns back to her place of origin and haunts the city like a ghost. The video invokes the cyclical movement of time, memory and human presence in these spatial palimpsests. It refers to the representation of memory by creating a series of mirrorings through the lost and found elements of spaces that have become the embodiment of the invisible.
Image credit: Infinite Nectar, Hera Büyüktaşcıyan. Lahore 2019. Image Courtesy: The artist and Green Art Gallery Dubai
The piece has been produced as a part of the 2nd Lahore Biennale 2020 in curatorial collaboration with Hajra Haider Karrar and supported by SAHA Association Supporting Contemporary Art From Turkey, National College of Arts Lahore and LUMS Gurmani Center for Languages and Literature
*The piece has been produced as a part of the 2nd Lahore Biennale 2020 in curatorial collaboration with Hajra Haider Karrar and supported by SAHA Association Supporting Contemporary Art From Turkey, National College of Arts Lahore and LUMS Gurmani Center for Languages and Literature
Hera Büyüktaşçıyan (b.1984 Istanbul, Turkey). In her multidisciplinary practice, Büyüktaşcıyan unfolds ways in which memory, identity, and knowledge are shaped by deeply ingrained yet constantly evolving waves of history. The artist often references mythology and theology, as well as specific architectural structures as the foundation for her works, closely observing their genealogies and the ways in which they shift and evolve over time. Through her site specific interventions, sculptures, drawings and films, Büyüktaşcıyan dives into terrestrial imagination by unearthing patterns of selected narratives and timelines that unfold the material memory of unstable spaces.
Selected exhibitions include:14th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2023); Ancestral Weavings, Tate Modern, London (2022); Matter of Art Biennale, Prague (2022); New Museum Triennial, New York (2021); 3rd Autostrada Biennial, Kosovo (2021); 2nd Lahore Biennial, Pakistan (2020); 6th Singapore Biennial, Singapore (2019); 1st Inaugural Toronto Biennale, Canada (2019); Gigantisme, FRAC, Dunkirk (2019); ifa Galerie, Berlin (2019); EVA International Ireland's Biennale, Limerick (2016); 56th Venice Biennale National Pavilion of Armenia, Italy (2015); Jerusalem Show VII (2014).
- Year2019
- Runtime10:55
- LanguageEnglish
- CountryTurkey