Hera Büyüktaşciyan, My Eye's Pupil Is Your Nest, 2021
Installation view at Autostrada Biennale, Prizren, Kosovo, 2021
A river always looks for a way somehow. But watercourses can also disappear until they can only be found as traces in the landscape or in collective memory (or imagination). The Turkish artist Hera Büyüktaşciyan has now recreated former watercourses in the city of Prizren in Kosovo with blue netting that is actually used on construction sites. The blue fabric meanders down a mountain, through tunnels and even through buildings. The idea of water is made visible, history appears as a colored band, and the changes caused by the urbanization of a place also become clear.
The work "My Eye's Pupil Is Your Nest" is part of the Autostrada Biennale, which is taking place in Kosovo for the third time this summer and has the motto "What If A Journey ...". The curators Joanna Warsza and Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu see the exhibition as a journey that leads to the cities of Pristina, Prizren and Peja. There it should be about the unfinished, growing and changeable. The 90-year-old documenta artist Agnes Denes planted a sunflower field in front of Pristina's imposing youth and sports palace. A sea of yellow flowers now stretches towards the politically charged architecture. It is also flourishing in the famous national library of the Kosovar capital. There the artists Petrit Halilaj and Alvaro Urbano installed huge fabric flowers, which now protrude into the temple of written knowledge.