LINE
curator: Basak Senova
Line 1 artists: Ali Cherri, Almagul Menlibayeva, Benji Boyadgian, Ceren Oykut, Maria Loizidou, Oya Silbery
Line 2 artists: Henrik Lund Jørgense, Fatma Bucak, Ibro Hasanović, Hera Büyüktasciyan, Emre Ekinci, Christina Georgiou
venue: ArtRooms
coordinates: Kyrenia, 2015
The fine line between ‘the self’ and its surroundings has always been penetrated from both sides. Yet this line determines the position and the identity of the self. In the same vein, the things ‘the self’ desires to sink into oblivion are pushed to the other side of this line. Therefore, this very line also functions as a tool for unresponsiveness and blindness.
Line exhibition gathers six distinctive works that accentuate the substance of alike lines, which constantly overwrite each other. The exhibition noticeably presents diverse artistic approaches and positions with each work. Aptly, Line inhabits artists and works from different geographies, while rendering and detecting comparable social, historical, psychological, and political realities that surround the artists.
LINE 1
Almagul Menlibayeva
Transoxiana Dreams, 2011
The film is about mythological narratives placed and staged in the vast landscape of Kazakhstan, ravaged by 60 years of Soviet occupation. The film displays the brutally changed region of the Aral Sea where its indigenous people live in the Aralkum, the desert of a once-thriving region now entirely devoid of water due to radical Soviet irrigation politics. According to the legend, when the ancient Greeks first encountered the nomads of the Transoxianian Steppes on their horses, they initially believed them to be mythological quadrupeds, part person and part animal, fearing their savage and magical powers.
Ali Cherri
Inha’s Cows, 2014
The project looks at the Finnish landscape photographer I. K. Inha’s (1865–1930) Finnish Agriculture series as a sign of the rise of the “modern society”, in which portrait photography has made possible the assertion of state power. By constructing a narrative around the photographs of cows, the project underlines the complex relationship between portrait photography, photographic archives, and the construction of national identities.
Benji Boyadgian
Sediments of Discord, 2014
The tension adopted on an element stretches it in opposite directions, causing tensile stress and eventually forming fractures. Like geological sediments, the surface is also subject to tension, mainly man-inflicted. In corollary, the landscape transforms itself into an amalgamation of patterns. Jerusalem, a geographical crossroads layered by rifted sediments, illustrates discord in multiple dimensions.
Maria Loizidou
Self-Other, 2006
Maria Loizidou’s video work “Self-Other” consists of a series of pencil drawings where the figures of Siamese twins (connected back to back) attempt to put on a coat made for two. This is a difficult move because of their connection as they are dependent on each other, and yet the act is constantly on a loop. The work refers to the Cyprus Problem that has been on a loop without resolution for over four decades now.
Oya Silbery
Waste/Ziyan, 2015
Today, as the capitalist system with an informed choice and a great appetite trivialize all elements of existence, we are beset by effortlessly-obtained superficial achievements and commercial trickery. Human beings who are deprived of individual responsibility and awareness refuse to confront their own reality and choose to adopt an attitude intending to corrupt all the values that make us human, without realising the importance of collective responsibility. This calls for a new memento mori to humanity.
Ceren Oykut
My swimsuit is Inside Mayom İçimde, 2011-2015
Making drawings derived from the concepts of city and everyday life, Ceren Oykut uses the images she produces as a field of study. By cutting and tearing her drawings into pieces she can create new images, or is able to force them to migrate from their original surfaces through various media, sometimes by collaborating with other disciplines, although most often with the “space”. Her works are an exchange in modes of production such as typography, pictography, cartography, calligraphy, miniature, shadow play, and caricature.
LINE 2
Ibro Hasanovic
Spectre, 2013
The film was shot in Yugoslav Navy (JRM) training ship “Galeb”, also known as The Peace Ship Galeb (Brod Mira Galeb), was used as an official yacht by the late President of the Yugoslav Republic, Marshal Josip Tito. The camera moves inside the hull of warship Galeb, anchored in Rijeka harbour, while the work itself was created during the author’s time, and is invisible, and of mysterious auras. The ghosts of Galeb, as the spectre of the system, occupy the vacant social and ideological place as their referential field, while glimpses are shown of the true destiny of the ship, which is to become a commodified tourist attraction.
Henrik Lund Jørgense
Friends He Lost At Sea, 2009
In his video Friends He Lost at Sea, Danish artist Henrik Lund Jørgensen takes up the subjects and compositions of two of Michael Ancher’s most well-known works: Will He Round the Point? (1879) and The Crew is Saved (1894). Both paintings are re-enacted in the manner of a tableau vivant, however with refugees from other countries taking the place of the fishermen. By having “boat people“ play the part of the heroic Skagen fishermen, the artist takes Ancher’s paintings into the scope of the present, renewing questions about escape and rescue, emigration and social responsibility. Like Michael Ancher’s heroic realism, Henrik Lund Jørgensen’s photo and video installation straddles the boundary between documentary and fiction, allowing a wide range of possible interpretations.
Fatma Bucak
Blessed Are You Who Come,
Conversation between Turkish – Armenian border, 2012
The work reflects and questions the cultural displacement between people of different cultural identities. Certain issues such as male power, religion, cultural memory, presence and absence are brought into view and collide with iconic force against the monumental power of images. The Turkish border village once home to Armenians before the Turkish-Muslims took their place has changed form physically and psychologically in a process of displacement caused by identity replacement. The simple gestures of a black dressed woman question the relationship between generations, genders, and religious identities giving the audience/performance a space to react to these gestures. The men’s conversation questions the performance and introduces elements of negotiation between the two parts.
Christina Georgiou
Voicing the Line, 2014
An installation based on a performance/intervention along the Border of Nicosia in collaboration with
Oya Akın
Looking at the relationship between the body and the psycho-geographical influence of the border, Voicing the Line interrogates how we perceive or conceptualise geography bodily. This project is also questioning of how the psycho-physical experience of the border is embedded in one’s memory, while (re)constructing an experiential mapping of how the body can be used to memorise or even “measure” the border of Nicosia, while experiencing it in the “here and now”.
Writing Vol. II, 2014
Hera Büyüktasciyan
Writing Vol. II is a series of drawings that focuses on the submarine telegraph cables passing underneath the oceans and seas for communication throughout history. The research and the work have unfolded some images to indicate the use of these cables that enabled the flow of information among different nodes during several historical periods. The word Telegraph, or Telegraphos in Greek, stands for “writing from a distance”, or “writing to a distant place”. Through her drawings, Büyüktasciyan is literally following the mapped and unmapped history of these cables and rewrites the narratives of the distant. In this context, these cables function as a topos that links the internal and the external, the personal and the social, the physical and the emotional, and finally, the literal and the imaginary.
Emre Ekinci
Four Walls, 2014
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The project consists of a series of photographs documenting the current status of a
‘derelict’ building that witnessed the war in Cyprus. Emre Ekinci perceives photography as a tool to establish ties with the past. In this context, Four Walls is beyond the mercilessness of time, documenting the uninterrupted violence of the war by chasing the traces of the stories in the places left behind. This building, together with the hosiery in the garden, belonged to the same family who used to live there before 1974. The house was located at the battle line of a very violent conflict, and both of the buildings were severely damaged during the war. Over time, the devastating effects of the economic crisis experienced in the post-war period pushed the house into desperate desolation. Currently, the house is situated next to the wires of a border military camp in Nicosia.
