Announcements

“Surfing in the New-wave” 14. July, 6:00 pm
Round-table discussion with Candaş Baş, Leman Sevda Darıcıoğlu, Ceren Oykut, Viron Erol Vert
Moderator: Didem Yazıcı

“Lick the scar, enter the wound” 14. July, 7:30 pm
Performance, 33 min.

The “You Are Another Me / Sen Başka Bir Bensin” exhibition promises to provide an inspiring experience for a fairer, more equitable and inclusive world. The exhibition can be seen at Koli Art Space from June 17th to July 16th, 2023.

Opening: June 17, 2023, from 16:00 to 21:00
Exhibition: The exhibition can be visited from June 17th to July 16th, 2023, on Fridays,
Saturdays, and Sundays, between 13:00 and 18:00
Artists: Akış Ka, Cansu Yıldıran, İlkin Zeybek, Leman Sevda Darıcıoğlu, Meltem Sarıkaya,
Mert Yemenicioğlu, Yaz Taşçı.
Curator: Tuba Kocakaya.
Venue: KOLİ / NOKS Art Space.
Address: Rasimpaşa Mah. Talimhane Sk. No:19B, 34716 Kadiköy/İstanbul.

From tomorrow until Sunday, LUBUNYA Dispatches, an initiative from Turkey in solidarity
with LGBTQ+ communities, takes over the ICA for our monthly curated film series Screen
Practices!

Turkey is a unique spatial-temporal context to understand the development, and more recently the regression, of lubunya emancipatory politics and discourse; both in localized and globalized reams. Legally, the Republic never criminalised homosexuality in the country’s formative constitution, meaning that lubunya communities historically enjoyed a level of legislative sexual and gendered freedom throughout the 20th century ill-afforded to its European and North American counterparts until much later.

For the whole program:
https://www.ica.art/films/lubunya-dispatches

“Heart Beats” presents the artistic explorations of two performance artists, Leman Sevda Darıcıoğlu and Martin Toloku, who both engage with the physicality of grief and trauma, inspired by their personal experiences and cultural backgrounds. The exhibition takes a closer look at the phenomena of bodily endurance in liminal conditions and its transgressive dimension, for instance in the realm of ritualized communal experience.

Feelings of grief, shame, anger or joy manifest in the body and its metabolism. The writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie describes the physical process of mourning as “crying with our muscles.” Here, the process of remembering happens not only in the mind but also in body tissue, muscles and bones. Which after-effects are felt of historical ownership in relation to the body and the land, on an individual and collective level? Leman Sevda Darıcıoğlu and Martin Toloku have created new works for the exhibition that address the metabolization and transformation of fear, loss, or stigmatization they sense in the context of the communities in the global South and North that they live in. In doing so, they interact with the particular architecture of the bear enclosure, which carries the weight inherent to a history of colonial and ecological displacement.

Both artists work at the intersection of durational performance and installation, inviting the audience to relate, spend time and share space together. Employing video, sculpture and vocal recordings, the artists set a stage and leave remains, allowing the visitors to glean from the past and anticipate future live-performance in the space.

Exhibition
“Heart Beats”
26.5. – 6.8.2023
with Leman Sevda Darıcıoğlu and Martin Toloku

Curated by
Malte Pieper and Maja Smoszna

“Heart Beats” is the second part of the annual programme GLEANING

With the kind support of the Senate Department for Culture and Europe, Exhibition Remuneration Fund and Exhibition Fund for Municipal Galleries. The work of Leman Sevda Darıcıoğlu was supported by SAHA Association – Supporting Contemporary Art from Turkey.

25/5/2023, 7 pm
Opening with performance “NOT NOW” by Martin Toloku

26/5/2023, 7 pm
Artist Talk with Martin Toloku and Orlando Maaike Gouwenberg

7/6/2023, 6 pm
“Beyond Languages”
Poets’ Corner in cooperation with the Haus für Poesie
Reading with Jasmina Al-Qaisi, Göksu Kunak and Rûveyda
Hosted by Nina Kettiger

5/8/2023, 1–7 pm
“Fire, everywhere”
Performance by Leman Sevda Darıcıoğlu

6/8/2023, 4 pm
Artist Talk with Leman Sevda Darıcıoğlu and Zippora Elders

For detailed info:
https://baerenzwinger.berlin/aktuell/

We have curated – selecting from 599 applications- a video art show program that we believe is representative of the current conceptual thinking and aesthetics of underrepresented artists worldwide. Performing Time: In Vivo/Ex Situ/In Situ presents a selection of fourteen video works that explore life and histories through time and space. The selection, presented in three parts – in vivo (in the body), ex-situ (out of place), and in situ (in place) – navigates memories archived within the body and through sites past, present, and future. An additional screening of works memorializes the human experience as influenced by time and place, whether in a post-apocalyptic Andes, a forgotten Turkish grave-site, or a red-lined Chicago neighbourhood. Combined, they seek to uncover the layered relationship between humanity and sites of remembrance and act as a survey of lived experience.

​On December 3, 2022,  presented by ProspectArt.org, audiences will be able to join the curators, Elizabeth Withstandley,

Gioj De Marco, Pedro Inock, and Rohksane Hovaida, at Flora Chang in downtown Los Angeles, where guests will be able to experience all the works in an intimate and unique setting.

https://www.prospectart.org/performing-time

“a childhood tale from the dark” will be shown at Goethe Institute Rome between 17 – 19 November. 2022 as part of The European Pavillion in Anti war coalition art project program.

Detailed information can be found here.

With contributions from Kondo Heller, Akinbode Akinbiyi, Amira Zarari, Ozan Zakariya Keskinkılıç, Arijit Bhattacharyya, Bruna Barros and Jess Oliveira, Alice Yuan Zhang, Sara Ehsan, Carla Abiles, Leman Sevda Darıcıoğlu, Jumoke Adeyanju and you … | Digital Platform | Launch event on November 13, 2022 at Oyoun | www.ronginshagor.com 

Being a common term in Bengali, “rongin shagor রঙিন সাগর” translates to “colorful ocean” – the ocean as a holder of memories: Our bodies as holders of memories, which puts us in direct relation to bodies of water.

“Will you remember to keep us afloat ?” – in turn – proposes a question at the ocean that gives and takes and creates a parallel to how and who shapes memory in our world. Who stays afloat and is remembered to stay afloat? Who will be devoured by tides and forced to be forgotten?

Starting with a poem by Afro-German poet May Ayim, Oyouns new artistic intervention rongin shagor reflects on cultures of memory by exploring the reflective and generative threads of cultural formations located in the senses of the oppressed body. Retracing and reweaving these threads are the incessant tasks of cultures that faced colonialism. Collective memory emerges from language and patterns of collective memory influence language as socially and culturally shared narrative genres. The project attempts to form a constellation of remembrance by interweaving cultural responses and transnational dialogue. This multimodal space will create a rupture between voice and silence, the oral and the visual and an attempt towards the survival of the sensory cultures in the world today.

Taking the shape of a virtual artistic chain letter, rongin shagor is investigating the concept of heritage by getting others involved in the discourse of how our history shapes our actions today. A number of multidisciplinary and multilingual artists will respond to the poem “community” by May Ayim, a progressive thinker and key figure that shaped the Afro- German movement until her untimely death in 1996.

rongin shagor – the colorful ocean – hereby symbolizes the variety of poetic and artistic interpretations and inspirations that emerge from one poem. They float, embark, collide and buoy in the same place, each marking approaches to respective struggles in identity politics. Dreams, visions, and associative powers of imagination in poetry are heightened through a collective growth of individual artworks that build on each other – starting with the aforementioned poem by May Ayim. Responses to her work by interdisciplinary artists will shape rongin shagor while setting the way for further participation.

The erasure caused by coloniality with the parallel narrative during the pandemic challenges us to face realities of loss, loss of connection, loss of oral tradition, loss of ritual, loss of loved ones, loss of physical touch, loss of justice. In all this loss, there is a need to create a collective shared space, where challenges faced by different diaspora communities in Berlin and beyond are made visible and heard. This digital/online participatory project will attempt to create a hub of knowledge through art and bring it to a wider community to experience the space and get engaged in the discourses over time.

Being a mainly digital project with manifestations in the physical space, this body of work looks at the broader interactions between European nations and the societies they colonised by dealing with issues of identity, language, representation, displacement, migration, resistance and agency. The artistic responses will be shared both on- and offline, culminating on a digital platform, which is due to launch later this year and which will be accompanied by a physical “opening” event at May-Ayim Ufer and Oyoun in Berlin.

“A Childhood story from the dark” will be shown in Centrum Kultury Zamek at Poznan within the curated Anti War Coalition Project program between 25. 10 – 31. 10. 2022.

Detailed information can be found here.

Angelus Altera
Leman Sevda Darıcıoğlu
SALT Beyoğlu
Part I: 11.00-14.30; Part II: 14.30-18.00

“His face is Our faces are turned toward the past. Where we you perceive a chain of events, he sees we see one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his our feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. We, actually go there, summon the ghosts, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. We have taken the storm blowing from the heavens into our wings and it is so powerful that these wings will never close up. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. In the storm and with the power granted by the ghosts from the pile of debris rising to the skyward, we are now building the future.”1

1 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken Books, 1969.

Leman Sevda Darıcıoğlu & Natis fka. Hasan Aksaygın

Taking its departure from the 90s archive of Turkey’s performance-art history, “Angelus Altera” addresses the relationality between the notions of heritage and future. To understand the ever-changing borders and boundaries of the 90s, the performance first looks to the 80s and navigates by drawing analogies between Turkey’s general socio-politics, Queer history, and performance art history.

From a Queer perspective, “Angelus Altera” investigates the hegemonic history, past and present by focusing on the notions of visibility & invisibility, (op)pressure & ease, (en)closure & opening/coming out through the body and opens itself to the future.

Realized in collaboration with Performistanbul and with the support of monoco.io, the performance will take place on Sunday, September 18 between 11.00-18.00 at Salt Beyoğlu on floors – 1 and 1. This free-admission program is open to everyone.

Costume Designer: Mert Yemenicioğlu
Advisor: Simge Burhanoğlu
Acknowledgements: Ali Emir Tapan, Natis fka. Hasan Aksaygın, Must Kika, İsmail İnan, Ayşe Gülru Sarpel

Materials such as glitter and sand to be used during the performance may be inconvenient for those with respiratory sensitivity.