Flying Too Close to the Sun, curated by Katerina Gregos and Ioli Tzanetaki, opens as an annual summer exhibition at Art Space Pythagorion, at Schwarz 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.

Hera Büyüktaşcıyan was born in Istanbul and comes from a multicultural background with Greek, Armenian and Turkish roots. In her multidisciplinary practice, Büyüktaşcıyan looks back on tumultuous histories rooted in territorial disputes, displaced populations, and ruptures often centering on the history of the broader geopolitical region of the former Ottoman Empire. In her sculptural installations, in-situ interventions, drawings, and films one often encounters archival or architectural elements that bear within them traces of extinction in order to revoke memory and allow the past to be rewritten.

Within the exhibition the works on display dates back from various period’s of Büyüktaşcıyan’s practice as well as a newly commisioned piece in relation to the history of Samos titled “A Rehearsal for Changing Skin II”.

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