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Stories Of Struggle: Istanbul Artist's New Exhibition On 1915 Follow

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  • Stories Of Struggle: Istanbul Artist's New Exhibition On 1915 Follow

    STORIES OF STRUGGLE: ISTANBUL ARTIST'S NEW EXHIBITION ON 1915 FOLLOWS WOMEN WHO RESISTED

    14:00, April 7, 2015

    Aret Gıcır's second solo exhibition, Between Fire and Sword, will
    run from April 10 to May 9 at the Oktem & Aykut contemporary art
    gallery in Istanbul.

    Its title inspired by the writer Zabel Yesayan's depiction of the 1909
    Cilicia massacres, Between Fire and Sword explores the irreversible
    rupture that took place in Anatolia one century ago. The artist
    attempts to approach the Catastrophe through the stories of Armenian
    women who struggled to protect their children, families, churches,
    schools and land by taking up arms and who resisted in order to stay
    alive in the period leading to 1915.

    In his paintings, Gıcır abstracts once again the already isolated
    geography and people by displacing them onto different, estranged
    spaces. He also challenges the perpetual reproduction - through
    politics, art, literature and cinema - of images of Anatolia that
    have depicted it as a lonely, romantic, forlorn or static landscape
    since the late years of the Ottoman Empire and the early years of
    the Republic. Against recent revived attempts at re-signification,
    Gıcır's paintings suggest that such imaginaries of Anatolia did
    not correspond to reality in the first place.

    The women whose stories and names are barely known except for the few
    photographs they have left behind and who are caught Between Fire and
    Sword (in Armenian, Unt Hur yev Unt Sur), now stand suspended before
    us between, on the one hand, bearing witness, and on the other hand,
    the impossibility of witnessing. The paintings ultimately question
    whether it is indeed ever possible to depict the Catastrophe within the
    limits of the artist's grasp, since, in the words of the novelist Hagop
    Oshagan, "The Catastrophe, immensurable yet at the same time peculiarly
    uniform, will always elude the artist who tries to penetrate it."

    The show will open at 6:30pm on April 9 at the Oktem & Aykut gallery
    which is located at Buyuk Hendek Caddesi, Portakal Sokak No:2 34420,
    Galata, Istanbul.

    Born in Istanbul in 1978, Aret Gıcır graduated from the Department
    of Painting of Yerevan State Academy of Fine Arts in 2008. His first
    one-person exhibition entitled "Yerevan" was held in Tokatlıyan Han in
    2009. He was awarded an artist residence in New York for his project,
    The Affliction of the Patriarch by the Moon and Stars Project-SVA in
    2013. Gıcır lives and works in Istanbul.

    http://hetq.am/eng/news/59481/stories-of-struggle-istanbul-artists-new-exhibition-on-1915-follows-women-who-resisted.html

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