The Land Across The Blind
Galeri Manâ will display the exhibition The Land Across The Blind by Hera Büyüktaşçıyan between 15 May – 28 June 2014 in Istanbul. Taking the relationship between sea and land as a metaphor, the exhibition explores the potential “to see beyond the visible”.
Installation at Gallery Manâ 2014
The exhibition takes its title from the prophecy of the oracle of Delphi that Byzas of Megara followed in his quest to found the new city of Byzance.
The tradition tells that Byzas planned to found a new colony. He consulted the oracle of Delphi, which instructed Byzas to settle opposite the “Land of the Blind”. Leading a group of colonists, Byzas found a location where the Golden Horn, meets the Bosphorus, opposite Chalcedon (today Kadıköy). He adjudged the Chalcedonians blind not to have recognized the advantages the land on the European side of the Bosphorus had over the Asiatic side.
Building on the speculative movement of the prophecy that defines a piece of land by its position “across the blind” and a promise to be seen, Büyüktaşçıyan’s works explore the relationship between the visible and the invisible.
Beyond the static and retinal understanding of vision, they stretch out towards movement in space and time on one hand, and cognitive processes such as contemplation and remembrance on the other. In Buyuktasciyan’s installations, architectural structures such as balconies and docks point to a transitional space between inside and outside, the past and the present time, the submarine realm and the surface of the land.
Footage from the artist talk and opening, May 20 at Gallery Mana Istanbul
Hera Buyuktasciyan uses metaphors from local myths, historic and iconographic elements, opens a new narrative scope for the ‘other’ in her works and combines it with concepts of absence and invisibility to compose an imaginary connection through identity, memory, space and time.
15.05.2014 – 28.06.2014
The Land Across The Blind
at Galeri Manâ, Istanbul
Kemankeş Mahallesi
Ali Paşa Değirmeni Sokak, no 16–18