DEPO SHOW EXPLORES UNSEEN HISTORY OF ANATOLIA
Today’s Zaman, Turkey
March 24 2015
The exhibition “Spectrography: Tracing the Ghosts” continues until
April 12 at the Depo art center in Ä°stanbul.
March 24, 2015, Tuesday/ 15:47:08/ RUMEYSA KIGER / ISTANBUL
With the Armenian centennial commemorations of the 1915 killings
approaching on April 24, a new exhibition delving into the painful
history of Anatolia through a collective exhibition by Anna Barseghian,
Stefan Kristensen and Uriel Orlow is on view at Depo in Ä°stanbul’s
Tophane neighborhood.
Titled “Spectrography: Tracing the Ghosts,” it can be considered as
the result of a joint visit to the eastern and southeastern parts
of Turkey, which was once home to an Armenian community. It is a
visual and aural exploration of a haunted territory, as written in the
exhibition text about the show. “The artists describe the experience
of ghosts; their work makes visible the absence of the disappeared,
in landscapes and ruins. By relating to people, and listening to
the silences of their words, and the expressions on their faces, the
works allow untimely memories to emerge at a turning of a path, on
the side of a mountain and in the radiance of a face,” it elaborates.
On the first floor of Depo, an installation titled “No Voice is Lost”
by artist and curator Barseghian and her collaborator Kristensen
features various videos intersecting with one another and constituting
a layered visual history. The videos include shots from the cities
of Kars and MuÃ…~_ — where Barseghian and Kristensen’s grandparents
once lived, and the stories they heard about Gulizar, whose name
became a resistance symbol for both Armenians and Kurds following
her abduction by Musa Bek in 1889 — and vast Anatolian landscapes,
ruins of old churches and so on. Méliné Ter Minassian, a French
actress and performer who is also a descendant of Gulizar, put on
a performance for the exhibition together with Barseghian that is a
collection of memories from the descendants of Gulizar. Another work
on the same floor that is also realized by the descendants of those
killed is titled “Journey to the Land of Ghosts.” Part of the project
“Armenography” and filmed in 2005, the video was shot during a tour
conducted by the Van Vaspourakan association and it features second-
and third-generation descendants visiting their grandparents’ villages
in Anatolia for the first time.
On the second floor, an installation titled “Remains of the Future”
by London-based artist Orlow includes a video filmed in a previously
Armenian town around the city of MuÃ…~_ on the orders of Gorbachev in
1988 for people who lost their homes in the Spitak earthquake. “Holy
Precursor,” by the same artist, features a Kurdish village this time,
delving into the history of former Armenian monastery Surp Garabed,
whose remains were used to build the current town.
“Spectrography: Tracing the Ghosts” will run through April 12 at Depo.