We are nowhere and its now

We are nowhere and its now

Khaled Barakeh, Elisa Caldana, Özlem Günyol & Mustafa Kunt, Barbara Hlali, Sara Rajaei, Dan Starling, Marko Tadić
Curated by Didem Yazıcı and Patrick Keaveney

8th – 23rd April 2011



We are nowhere and its now brings together works by Khaled Barakeh, Elisa Caldana, Özlem Günyol & Mustafa Kunt, Barbara Hlali, Sara Rajaei, Dan Starling, and Marko Tadić. The exhibition seeks to map out in a series of works tenuous links and differing ideas of the displaced.
 
The cities and forests and beings were also without identity, they were shadows, they exerted neither pull nor goad . . . His being was without axis or contour, its center everywhere and periphery nowhere... (Samuel Beckett)
The notion of displacement can take many forms and guises. It can be traced in many issues of social antagonism within different generations, social groups, medias, and geographies. Marc Auge's description of the non-place can be said to be an idea that exists within the negative: it is a term that is identified against a background of that which it's not. Where place is defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity's non-places are seen to be the negation of these aspects. Paradoxically however as much as this term seems to create a tone of nostalgia with a sense of loss for 'place', it is precisely through the articulation of this loss that 'place' has emerged again with a renewed vigor within the bandwidth of theoretical study. The works in this show resonate differently within the idea of this paradoxical threshold, of that which emerges as being lost. Whether it be the desire for a return to the 'political', a sense of longing for the place called home, or even a nostalgia for the era of science fictions; each artist traces out in their own method what is missing and in doing so how it can be found again. It could be a rope, a bench, a postcard; or an urban landscape or the story of a kidnapping; We are nowhere and its now is an attempt to map onto the issues of form within an artwork the questıon; how far can a social issue which is inscribed into aesthetics relate to the disparity and displacement of a given social situation.

Photograph: Elisa Caldana, A monument with no name, photographic documentation, 2010.

http://occupy-space.blogspot.com/p/current-exhibitions.html