ART-PRESENTATION:An Exile on Earth
Having left their countries to live and produce elsewhere, Juan Goytisolo* and Tezer Özlü perceived themselves at times as travelers and at times as exiles, but always as “exiles of the earth”. Rather than seeking refuge in a migrant identity or identity politics, they thought and wrote about the reality which was constantly shifting due to increased mobility and migration in a globalizing world.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Zilberman Gallery Archive
The group exhibition “An Exile on Earth”, that is on view at Zilberman Gallery InIstanbul, brings together works by: Antonio Cosentino, Manaf Halbouni, Hiwa K and Zeynep Kayan that the artists produced in the last three years through their experiences in Germany. The exhibition is titled with reference to the compilation “An Exile on Earth” by the Juan Goytisolo*, who tactfully reflects the spirit of the exile, as well as to the self-perception of Tezer Özlü**, who spent many of her years in Germany as a Turkish writer who considered life as an act of leaving. The exhibition opens with the performative images that Zeynep Kayan, in her temporary studio in Berlin, delivers as a result of internal questioning on the concepts of changing one place to another and/or that of staying in between two states. The first series of Manaf Halbouni dedicated to the uprooted on the road, implicate the artist’s nomadic spirit and his independent disposition, while his second work, perceived as a public monument for peace, carries the reality of the Syrian Civil War as one of the most tragic wave of migration of the recent years to the public squares of Berlin and Dresden. The first video-story of Hiwa K, who fled from another tragedy in the same geography, flows like a poem about the artist’s journey from Iraq up to Germany and his emotional experience of being on exile, while his second work is as touching and striking as the official interrogations that asylum seekers and refugees go through all the time. As to Antonio Cosentino’s works following one of his dreams in his studio in Berlin in which a wall not unlike the Berlin War has separated Istanbul into two parts, they must be the manifestations of his sense of alinage, belonging and not-belonging chasing him wherever he goes from Istanbul.
*Juan Goytisolo was a Spanish poet, essayist, and novelist. He was considered Spain’s greatest living writer at the beginning of the 21st Century, yet he had lived abroad since the 1956, when his deep opposition to Francisco Franco’s regime led him into exile in Paris.
** Tezer Özlü was a Turkish writer, she spent her childhood in Simav, Ödemiş and Gerede. She went to Instabuu when she was 10 years old. In 1981 she went to Berlin with a DAAD writers in residence scholarship. She wrote, “I’ve never suffered the pain of falling in love. Because the pain of being on earth has always been more overbearing than that”.
Info: Curator: Çelenk Bafra, Zilberman Gallery, İstiklal Cad. No.163 Mısır Apartmanı K.3, D.10 Beyoğlu / Istanbul, Duration: 27/11/18-2/2/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-19:30, Sat 12:00-19:00, http://zilbermangallery.com
