Hera Büyüktaşcıyan, The Observers, 2018 © Victoria Tomaschko

06.06.2019
ifa-Galerie Berlin

In the context of Lange Nacht der Ideen („The Long Night of Ideas“), ifa-Galerie Berlin is showing Hera Büyüktaşcıyan’s exhibition Neither on the Ground, nor in the Sky, curated by Nat Müller. Being inspired by a floor mosaic in Berlin’s Pergamon Museum known as the Alexandrine Parakeet Mosaic that was taken from the ancient Palace of Pergamon (now Bergama in Turkey), the exhibition poetically explores what migration, heritage, belonging and displacement mean. 

Through video, sculptures and mixed media installations Büyüktaşcıyan offers us a temporality that is non-linear, a place that is liminal, and allows us to travel through history while turning us to our unruly present. The provenance and ownership of antiquities and colonial artefacts is currently debated extensively in academia and museum circles. This forms the political backdrop to the project. However, Büyüktaşcıyan broadens these notions and takes us on a journey that traverses time and place by touching on universal sensibilities such as loss, identity, and history. 

Peripatetic Stories is a lecture performance by Aris Anagnostopoulos, Katerina Konstantinou and Hera Büyüktaşcıyan who will stroll through the exhibition and narrate overlapping stories, musings and reveries drawing from various contexts and flowing towards different directions. Yet merge within the same flux. 

Peripatetic act as a form of storytelling reflects on the ancient practice of walking as creating a pedagogic space for philosophical theorising as well as a virtual discovery through traveling from one place to another as per Aristotle’s definition. This lecture performance will overlap multiple layers of reminiscences upon Hera Büyüktaşcıyan’s work by bringing to the fore stories of empires and monuments, traces and absence, displacement and exile. 

A screening of the film Palimpsests (2017) by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige will follow the walking lecture performance. The evening will conclude with a panel discussion with ifa-Galerie’s guests Aris Anagnostopoulos, Katerina Konstantinou and the artist Hera Büyüktaşcıyan.

Performance Walk and discussion will be held in English.

Aris Anagnostopoulos (Heritage Management Organization, Greece) is an anthropologist, historian and writer. His research focuses on the poetics and politics of the past. He has done ethnographic research in several archaeological projects in Greece and has published extensively on Ottoman heritage in Crete. His experimental fiction invents writer personas to investigate issues of memory, archive, gender, science and artistic production, in collaboration with visual artists.

Katerina Konstantinou is an art historian and a curator. She is currently a PhD candidate of Social Anthropology at Panteion University (Athens, Greece). Her research interests focus on the intersection of the fields of contemporary arts, anthropology and archaeology. Lately, she has been closely collaborating with artists in various projects that involve art-based research methods and practices.

Hera Büyüktaşcıyan (b. 1984 Istanbul) lives and works in Istanbul and Athens. Her practice explores issues of identity, memory, history, time and space. She often draws on metaphors from local myths and on historic and iconographic elements of various geographies to tell the untold.

About Lange Nacht der Ideen
Germany’s Foreign Office and it’s partners are celebrating the fourth Lange Nacht der Ideen on 6 June 2019, entitled Idea and Ideal – Europe and looking at the concept of Europe from diverse angles. At key v of Berlin’s cultural landscape, from Volksbühne and Barenboim Said Academy to the Silent Green Quartier in the Wedding neighbourhood, visitors and guests can experience the wide scope of Germany’s Foreign Cultural Relations activities. 
The full programme can be found at http://menschenbewegen.jetzt/LNDI2019 (German only).