Perfor­mance:
Απογευματινή Ὀδύσσεια/
The Afternoon Odyssey/
Bir İkindi macerası

SALT Beyoğlu, Forum

“Imagine a ship that floats in the middle of the sea by itself, all alone; it can easily drift in any direction and get lost if no one controls it. On the other hand, visualize a sea, its surface busy with ships. What would happen to them? They would not let any single one among them fade away and would maintain their rediscovered unity.

The Afternoon Odyssey is the story of a social and ethnic history of 87 years that involves birth, death, achievement, loss and a total transformation within a society throughout time. It not only refers to a specific ethnical identity, but also reflects the collective memory of an entire segment of society. If it detaches itself from life, and blends into the main stream, this unity can never be reestablished. Here, notions of ‘forgetting’ and ‘remembering’ arise. What is forgotten has no option but to face this great fall and loss; it could completely vanish and cease to exist. Such a loss within a society does not only shake the foundations, but also causes unforeseen deprivations, which reveals the fact that the language of communication is completely lost. The unity within a society can be reestablished only when a common language is rediscovered and when the word ‘I’ becomes ‘Us’.” - Hera Büyüktaşçıyan

Hera Büyüktaşçıyan’s The Afternoon Odyssey performance, that will take place at SALT Beyoğlu, aims to give an open call to create a platform to build up a common language and underline the importance of the power of collective. In this interactive project, participants will be asked to build their own ships from the Greek-language daily newspaper Apoyevmatini (published in İstanbul) and become a part of the sea of the rediscovered unity. As a part of the performance, responding to the 87th year of the newspaper, Konstantinos Kavafis’ poem On Board Ship, narrated by people who, despite the fact that they cannot read Greek, have supported Apoyevmatini while it faced financial problems, will be used as a sound installation in the Forum.

Hera Büyüktaşçıyan was born in İstanbul in 1984. She graduated from Marmara University Fine Arts Faculty Painting department in 2006. Her works deal with notions of otherness, belonging, xenophobia, social identity and memory. Selected exhibitions she participated in include: Scan Istanbul (2003, İstanbul); Going Public’06 (2006, Milan); The Other (2007, PiST///7-24); Changeables & Transformables (2009, İstanbul); Living and working in İstanbul (İstanbul, 2010); art.homes (2010-2011, Munich-İstanbul); Worthy Hearts (2011, Yerevan).