Bilsart is hosting Hera Büyüktaşcıyan and Mehmet Ali Boran’s exhibition entitled Talking with the Not- Existent curated by Ahmet Ergenç between October 7 - October 28, 2020
These videos of Mehmet Ali Boran and Hera Büyüktaşcıyan, in which two birds stand in the center, and even birds are narrators, share a similar narrative form as well as a common problem: to save the past, to make the "ghosts" of the past talk and reread the present with those rescued ghosts. Considering that the policy of forgetting, falsifying or turning the past into ghosts is one of the main ideological moves, these two videos are both intervening against the dominant ideological narrative. And these interventions open another pathway that could pave the way for what Foucault called 'counter-history' and 'counter- memory'.
Derrida's (now well-known and widely discussed) concept of hauntology can be used for both videos. Derrida's method was to look at the "ghosts" of history or narratives and deconstruct the official landscape or narrative. Not ontology, but hauntology. Looking at nonexistent, not existent. Or as Sevim Burak said: “Speaking with nonexistent.” Here, both Boran and Büyüktaşcıyan make the ghostly stories of the past speak: a conversation with the ones who are considered “nonexistent”.
In her video work entitled “Neither on the Ground nor in the Sky”, Büyüktaşcıyan embarks on a journey through a bird figure within times, she is making a move of saving the past by overlapping the present with the past. The "main-character" in this move is a bird inspired by a "parrot mosaic" from 160-150 B.C., which was found in Bergama. This bird’s travels back and forth between Pergamon of ancient times and today’s Bergama connects two time periods: critical issues such as history, loss, and historical narrative are told through the testimony of this bird. This testimony makes one feel that the past has not passed yet; those ghosts vibrate in stones, structures and geography. A ghost roams Anatolia, a ghost waiting to be revealed by a hauntological excavation.