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5 films in package
Children of Yam
A reoccurring story of migration and the floods we carry within us.
I Feel Nothing
I Feel Nothing is a video-poem inspired by acts of detachment and violent erasures as interpreted from Palestinian folk tale The Girl Without Hands.
Infinite Nectar
Infinite Nectar derives from poetics of space through abandoned Sikh heritage buildings in Lahore carrying traces of 1947’s Partition. These spaces have been resilient to power shifts, urban transformations and cycles of trauma throughout history. The artist unfolds these layers through architectural juxtapositions and overlaying them with animated flowing stones. A fragmented marble hand of Maharani Jindan Kaur returns back to her city, rendering as a ghost reminding the unspoken. The piece refers to the representation of memory through a series of mirrorings with lost and found elements of spaces that have become the embodiment of the invisible.
Sea of Beginnings
A woman who is informed of the death of her dream embarks on an oneiric quest across land and sea as an act of exorcism of a past that failed.
Turtles All the Way Down
Turtles All the Way Down is a narrative constructed from different stories that intertwine debated fictional belief and documented scientific accomplishment. The video starts with the retelling of a story that most famously appeared as the first paragraph in physicist Stephen Hawking’s book “A Brief History of Time”. The story describes a debate between a scientist and an old lady about the nature of the universe. The debate ends with the old lady claiming that the world is a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise. When asked “And what is the tortoise standing on?” She responded, “It’s turtles all the way down”. Moving on, in the next chapter, to Edwin Hubble’s milestone discovery that the universe is expanding, followed by the story of The Great Moon Hoax as published in the New York Sun in 1835. The film ends with the artist proposing the initiation of a cosmic search for what he called the “Super Universal Fossil”; a sponge-like meteorite, that would carry the genetic code of the universe.

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, geopoliticaland 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, scienceand the intricate entanglements between deep geological time and human historical time, these artists and filmmakers address topical issues such as dispossession, migration, protracted politicaland 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).

  • Year
    2019
  • Runtime
    10:55
  • Language
    English
  • Country
    Turkey