For LISTE 2018, Green Art Gallery will present a dialogue between 2 artists within the same generation Hera Büyüktaşçıyan (b. 1984, Istanbul, Turkey) and Maryam Hoseini (b.1988, Tehran, Iran). Using different media in their work, both artists consider themselves as “storytellers”, weaving together various histories with contemporary concerns. This will be their first presentation together and their first presence in Basel.

Much of Büyüktaşçıyan’s work is defined by an architectural and anthropological approach, and she often favours site-specific installations inspired by the memories found within a place. She examines the way in which virtual spaces operate in relation to the physical, and how fragments of time and memory can be unearthed, restructured and woven together to bring to life a forgotten aspect of time and history. As ever, she also touches on larger issues of geopolitics, culture and ongoing change.

Büyüktaşçıyan also probes how memories of a space are shaped by waves of power throughout centuries. She brings together people, geographies and timelines in history to link themes of power, production, labour, destruction and invisibility, all through the dual entities of marble and water – two elements that, for the artist, are beyond time.

Born in Tehran, Iran, Maryam Hoseini explores the concept of ruins in a politicized social space. Hoseini captures empty historical echoes as bodies walk among the literal and figurative, the visible and invisible ruins of objects and architectures. In the context of the censored female figure, Hoseini presents her subjects as nude, cast simultaneously as unrealistically flattened diagrams of the human body, and hyperrealistic disembodied limbs covered in hair.