Hera Büyüktaşcıyan
The Schwarz Foundation is pleased to announce the exhibition FLYING TOO CLOSE TO THE SUN, its annual summer exhibition at Art Space Pythagorion, the foundation’s venue in Samos since 2012.
The exhibition brings together two artists, Hera Büyüktaşcıyan and Maria Tsagkari, whose practice is research-based and concerned predominantly with the history and memory of the wider region of the Eastern Mediterranean and especially that of Greece and Turkey in the aftermath of the Ottoman Empire and the consolidation of the idea of the nation-state. Both artists’ practice – which includes film, sculpture and installation – is centred on a confrontation with the past; through a multi-disciplinary approach they weave memories, reflections and storytelling in order to demonstrate how the personal and the historical converge and intersect.
In their work, both Hera Büyüktaşcıyan and Maria Tsagkari, bring to the fore issues of absence, invisibility, as well as marginalised, suppressed or forgotten narratives in order to anchor memory through unseen and obscured aspects of time, space as well as cultural memory as they all relate to ruptures in socio-political histories.
Excavating and unearthing unexpected narratives, occurrences and momentous events the artists highlight the entanglements between geographies of proximity and point to the material and psychological memory of unstable or contested spaces and territories. Their work explores the way longing or trauma manifests itself through objects and activates mechanisms of memory, by calling forth experiences of war, displacement, exodus and migration and the parallel histories that emerge because of them.