Kalıntıların Ötesinde // Beyond the Remains

Martch Art Project is hosting Sinem Dişli’s exhibition ‘Beyond the Remains’ within the scope of SENKRON’s‘ Synchronous Video Exhibitions’.

With this exhibition, Martch Art Project is presenting a selection of works from Sinem Dişli’s decade-long work on Urfa, the city where she was born and raised. The artist investigates the interrelation between structures which we define as living beings and their surroundings through fields such as archaeology and geology; observes time and space as well as the cycles and processes in between these notions by looking at the natural and cultural landscape of Mesopotamia. She provides multifaceted depictions regarding the region; from narratives about the relationship between the locals and the caves that once functioned as their homes from which they were evacuated for touristic purposes, to narratives about the perception of components such as hills, stone and water. A talk on the exhibition of Sinem Dişli, with the participation of Ömür Harmanşah who is an architectural historian, a landscape archaeologist and Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Illinois at Chicago, will take place concordantly with the exhibition through Instagram at 18.00 on April 17, Saturday.

Geologically speaking, northern Urfa is composed of basalt and southern Urfa of limestone. While basalt is a volcanic rock of lava coming from the eruption of the volcano, Karacadağ; limestone is made up of skeletal fragments of marine organisms. Both of these formations, black and white respectively, scatters around and put into numerous daily uses from the making of pavements to tombstones. Tracing these substances that constitute the natural and cultural landscape of Urfa, I ended up in quarries. In utilizing these materials, one had to go underground. The earth was unearthed and the mountains were punctured. Mounds became hollows and hollows in turn created mounds. The stone processing today is quite technical and practical. The advanced equipment makes easier and faster to transform a rock once belonged to earth, into a commodity. Thus, one wonders, how the basalt was processed in Göbekli Tepe in 12.000 years ago? How did stone and water acted together? This video was recorded in a basalt factory, after a massive piece rock excavated and arrived to processing. Two adjacent frames tell two different stories about the last reconnection of stone and water. As a sharp electric blade cuts through the rock with its full capacity, an aggressive splash of pressured water pours over it simultaneously to keep the dust away. In one hundred twenty frames per second recording, the association between rock and water is represented.

This four-channel video that presents Kızlar Tumulus, which is located in close proximity to the city centre of Urfa, was shot in the duration of four years, once a year in different seasons, from the same point of view. Containing various languages, daily conversations and mythical stories, this video installation observes in cycles the relationship of people with this hill. Around this hill, which was declared a first-degree archaeological site, the region undergoes a rapid transformation as the land is cultivated with the water supplied from the Euphrates and the stubble is burnt. Yet, the hill ceases to be a protected and forbidden site or a historical piece whose findings are sealed in a museum but rather keeps the organic bond with its surroundings alive as it is open to daily use by the people of the region, who do not care about its archaeological background and who only refer to it as “the mountain”.

“Authorities resettled those who lived in these caves at the old city of Urfa to modern apartment buildings in order to enable use of these caves for touristic purposes. As a kid, we used to enter the caves that emerged as a result of excavation works that were carried out in order to fix the infrastructure of the city, only to be covered again immediately after, and we used to whirl continuously around ourselves without knowing why. I invited people who once lived in.”