The Settlement Of The Time – İstanbul 2017
“THE SETTLEMENT OF THE TIME”
ARTIST 2017 / 27. Istanbul Art Faır
4-12 November
Throughout the ages, utopias which have longing the hope and absolute happiness of humanity, mostly been in the field of art and politics. In particular, literary production has produced powerful fictional texts through this notion of imaginable but impossible.
Ursula K. Le Guin, a incorrigible dreamer and utopia writer, writes the story of “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” as inspired by a question in Dostoevsky’s novel “The Brothers Karamazov”: “If the happiness of a city depended on the torture of a small child every day, what would the city people do?” In the story, the people of utopia / city Omelas become unable to share the happiness of the city after the day of their torture and leave Omelas (to build a less perfect and more humane life).
The “Settlement of the Time” is attempting to ask this story of the literary field in today’s world, where great tragedies and mass deportations are experienced, by imposing sanctions. Imagine a world / country that makes utopias jealous, because millions of people live a happy life and it depends on whether the only condition is that a lost soul must suffer from torment alone. What do you do in this situation?
The utopias take their meaning from the accent and longing that they have in them. In “nowhere” where is the concept corresponds, it whip and feeds the desire to search within us. Another reality that has developed in parallel with the depreciation of utopias today is that the present good (whatever comes to mind now!) is under an unsustainable threat. Now, as it is often reiterated, man is the victim of barbarism in a way that is as vulnerable and insecure as ever. While the we are being pushed from place to place in the spiral of earthly disasters, we can only hold on to time, settling in time and moving only on it.
Artists who are immigrants, exiles, refugees, unjust / homeless people, who are scattered to different parts of the world, will read the sculptures and thoughts embodied in their own existence and bodies when they are inhabited / residented with their exhibition “Time of Settlement”. Perhaps the best they know (and because they live) is how the utopia could be “disutopya” …
Curator: Baris Seyitvan
Artists: Adalet Garmiany, Ali Asker Bal,Aşkın Ercan, Gelawesh Waledkhani, Hawar Amini, Heja Rahmani, Khadija Baker, M. Ali Boran, Murat Gök, Nisan Güven
Place: Tuyap Fair and Congress Center, Buyukcekmece, Istanbul