Project Archive: http://here-there-abroad.blogspot.com/
20,22,23 November.2007 ifa-gallery, Stuttgart
29November,2007 ifa gallery Berlin

Artists: 2/5BZ aka Serhat Köksal, Ali Demirel, Asli Çavusoglu, Asli Sungu, Canan Senol, Erinç Seymen, Esra Ersen, Isil Egrikavuk, Nevin Aladag, Sefer Memisoglu, Özlem Günyol & Mustafa Kunt

HERE..THERE..ABROAD
Video Days

The festival Here…There…Abroad… screens a variety of artistic positions. Twelve artist videos and a performance aim to underline the need for a dialogue and for establishing a meaningful perspective on togetherness, society, realms of everyday. All the participants as well as the curator would traditionally be categorized as Turkish. However, this ascription is juxtaposed by the actual artists’ varying, sometimes hybrid biographical backgrounds.

The internationalisation of concepts and discourses functions in producing closures and distances. The understanding of global in the context of local and the local in relation to global not only produce multiplicities but also lead to singularities in the course of meaning and attribution. Reflecting the complexity of scenes through art production is significant in order to challenge oversimplifying categorisations.

Here..There..Abroad.. has been structured in three parts, where every part hosts a group of works that are regularly and irregularly related to the framing theme. The section titled HERE will be hosting works that are realised in the localities of the artists, i.e. both in Turkey and Germany; THERE will be hosting works on issues that do not surround but have taken the interest or informed the imagination of the artist, and ABROAD will be works investigating experiences made “abroad”.
Thus in the festival, the different positions of the contemporary artists are presented in correspondence to the space they reflect upon. Living and working in a particular space, the artists’ conceptual practice effectively widens these spaces and the ways in which they are perceived.

In social theory and post-modern literary criticism, spatial metaphors have become a predominant means by which social life is understood. ‘Theoretical spaces’ have been explored, mapped, charted, contested, de-colonized, and everyone seems to be ‘travelling’ under the influence of epochs of simultaneity, juxtaposition, the places near and far, side by side and dispersed. Addressing issues of the political, the humorous, the serious, the cutting-edge, the alternative, the sub-cultural, the relational, HERE..THERE..ABROAD aims to underline the permeable borderline between here and there, between there and abroad. The festival calls for a better understanding of the self, of the other and of we.

HERE..
Asli Sungu, Arapsaci – Tangled Affair – Kraushaar, 2004, Dvd, 7’20“
Esra Ersen, Brothers & Sisters, 2003, Dvd, 23’20“

THERE..
Sefer Memisoglu, Isimsiz – untitled, 2005, Dvd, 6’
Isil Egrikavuk, Infamous Library, 2006, Dvd, 7’40“
Ali Demirel, W…, 2001, Dvd, 6’15“
Canan Senol, Bir bardak sicak sekerli su – A Glass of hot water with sugar, 2002, Dvd, 22’40“

ABROAD..
Asli Cavusoglu, Bir Turk Doktoru: Omer Ayhan – A Turkish Doctor: Omer Ayhan, 2004, Dvd, 11’
Ozlem Gunyol & Mustafa Kunt, Section 1, 2005, Dvd, 4’44“
Erinc Seymen, Master Mick, 2005, Dvd, 9’56“
Nevin Aladag, Voice Over, 2006, Dvd, 14’

Performance by 2/5 BZ, aka Serhat Koksal