Sibel Horada's solo exhibition "Interruption and Flow" meets the audience at Versus Art Project between November 4 and December 31, 2021. While the artist's ongoing practice of establishing relationships between urban, archeological and ecological cultures is also evident in this exhibition, her current works add a different dimension to her questioning on memory. Taksim, construction, national identity, memory, waterways, squares and demolition are the main reference points of the exhibition.
Is it possible to keep the memory of the place? What about the memory of a city? In Horada's productions, these questions find their answers beyond memory retention, as reproduction and transformation.
The works in the exhibition are fed by the short film, The Division [Taqsim] of Water, completed by the artist in 2020. The work emerges as the artist reflects on Taksim Square, which she experienced during her time at SAHA Studio between August 2019 and February 2020, and re-imagines that the historical Taksim Maksem, after which the square is named, metaphorically maintains its function of dividing water between neighborhoods. Starting from the difficulty of carrying the past of Taksim Square and imagining its future, the study explores ways of being in touch with the space and thinking together. The work, which enters into a new dialogue with space and time in Versus Art Project, spreads physically to the gallery.
The installation titled Making Space in Still Water (Opening Space (Field) in Still Water) (2021), which is about water, one of the most important witnesses of the city, focuses on the blockages and the possibilities of fluidization in Taksim Square. The map, which traces back the historical waterway stretching from Belgrad Forest to Taksim and continues along the corridor of the gallery, ends with the installation named Valide (2021), which includes images taken in the Valide Sultan Dam.
In the small room in the middle of the gallery, a beach welcomes the viewer, consisting of pieces of styrofoam collected from the seaside in the unmanned bays of Burgazada, where the artist lives. This work, Shaped by Water (2021), based on living with contamination, aesthetics and practices of belonging, invites the viewer to reflect on the concepts of nature and naturalness.
The newspaper, one of the biggest witnesses of the passing of time, is another material in the exhibition. In the series “Ebruli Anıt” (2019- ), the artist's marbling works on daily newspapers allow us to look at time from an unusual perspective.
