Hera Büyüktaşcıyan

Rarely exhibited in France, the artist will present a cycle of films and a lecture performance titled Dream of a Falling Star, followed by a conversation with curator Hajra Haider Karrar. 

Inspired the Alexandrine Parakeet Mosaic (160-150 BC), (psittacula eupatria) from a fragment of a Hellenistic mosaic floor, preserved in Berlin at the Pergamon museum, Neither on the Ground, nor in the Sky (2019), reveals the topographical memory of Pergamon and the underlying cycles of erasure. Native to the Punjab in Pakistan, a valued gift in the time of Alexander the Great, the bird moves throughout the film like a spectral entity linking terrestrial and imaginary territories to invisible, contested narratives and repetitive cycles. The title of the work alludes to the neighborhood adjacent to the ancient city of Pergamon, where houses are built on a bridge as if suspended in the void, between the sky and earth. The figure of the parakeet resonates with the state of this neighborhood through its liminal position between landscapes, timelines, past and present narratives. The bird returns to where all has started in the form of clay representation, and acts as a guide weaving between the ruins of the ancient city of Pergamon, remnants of once Asia Minor city and the present-day Bergama. 

In Infinite Nectar (2020), a fragmented marble hand touches architectural collages as it wanders through the abandoned buildings of Lahore's Sikh heritage. Having historically resisted changes of power, cycles of urban transformation and trauma, these sites bear the traces of 1947 Partition. The hand, with its enigmatic presence, is a metonymy for Maharani Jindan Kaur, the last empress of the Sikh empire and a revolutionary female figure, who returns back to her place of origin and renders throughout the city like a ghost that reminds the unseen. The piece invokes the cyclical movement of time, memory and human presence in these spatial palimpsests.  

In The Labyrinth of the World, Paradise of the Heart (2022), Büyüktaşcıyan anchors the underground and aerial through Prague's aquatic architecture, featuring the Bubeneč sewage treatment plant and the city's public baths. Referencing the allegorical work of the Czech philosopher, pedagogue and theologian John Amos Comenius, she explores in this work-palimpsest the metaphorical charge of the purification plant, built around notions of purity and cultural contamination. Within the stop-motion sequences, glass beads stream between the cavities of these aquatic spaces, reverberating distilled traces of cultural appropriation across a historical continuum that the film restores. Invoking orientalist representations of otherness, the artist brings out certain tensions between body and surface, ornament and power, characteristic of Prague's colonial past, as a threshold of multiple temporalities and common imaginaries. 

The Dream of a Falling Star (2023) derives from a noted dream from the memoir of an expatriate from the village of Livissi in the former Lycian province of southwest Turkey which has remained abandoned since the Asia Minor Catastrophe of 1922, and the mass exiles that followed. Made for the Centre Pompidou, this reading-performance departs from a journey into different timelines that meanders around ancient dreams, constellations, petrified bodies and resurrecting voices of surfaces. A dream as a space for self-revelation and a place where hidden aspects resurface unexpectedly, here unfolds the lithic silence of a turbulent past embodied in oneiric waves.