Protocinema is happy to announce Once Upon a Time Inconceivable, a group exhibition on the occasion of our ten year milestone, cross-examining the pair of perception and realization; and their impairments in relation to time and space, bringing together works by Abbas Akhavan, Hera Büyüktaşçıyan, Banu Cennetoğlu, Ceal Floyer, Gülşah Mursaloğlu, Zeyno Pekünlü, Paul Pfeiffer, Amie Siegel, and Mario García Torres. The exhibition and public programs will take place at and with the kind collaboration of Beykoz Kundura, a cultural hub formerly a factory site of various mass-manufactures from the Ottoman Era to the present day, situated on the north-east coast of the Bosphorus, Istanbul.
Coming at a crucial moment of crisis and loss that urges us to rethink all establishments and reevaluate personal, local and global relationships, Once Upon a Time Inconceivable invites us to reassess curious workings of perception and realization. Through the artworks bending perceived temporalities and conceived spatialities, this exhibition sheds light on the process of realization itself. Focusing on the dynamics of perception and realization matters as it turns our unevenly shared experience of the past into fuel for further changes in understanding that may (or may not) translate into changes in action.
Hera Büyüktaşcıyan’s new sculpture will resonate with the nature of Beykoz Kundura, once a factory mass producing paper and leather and now a site used for film sets. Taking the building’s ongoing relation to skin as a façade (or façade as a skin), Büyüktaşçıyan invests in the morphology of surfaces that bears traces of time through material poetics. She activates the space by deconstructing our perception of the interior and exterior, and investigates how our physical positions are being shaped within it.