Hera Büyüktaşcıyan

14th Gwangju Biennale | South Korea

The 14th Gwangju Biennial presents Hera Büyüktaşcıyan's new project Earthbound Whisperers in collaboration with SAHA and Tate. Questioning the relationship between body and landscape, Hera Büyüktaşcıyan explores the underlying dynamics of surface and invisibility through anthropomorphic monoliths inspired by the Nine Maidens standing stones in Cornwall during her SAHA-supported residency at Tate St Ives in the South West of the United Kingdom. According to Celtic legend, the maidens were petrified for singing during the Sabbath. Büyüktaşcıyan draws a parallel between these mythical characters and female workers at the Crysède silk factory in St Ives who later on worked in silence while making camouflage netting to conceal military and civilian buildings during World War Two. With these references, silence becomes an agent in the creation of obscure and imaginary topographies while translating threads of fragility within terrestrial memory bearing the weight of history.

Under the artistic direction of the established curator of Tate Modern, Sook-Kyung Lee, the 14th Gwangju Biennale titled soft and weak like water proposes to imagine our shared planet as a site of resistance, coexistence, solidarity and care by thinking through the transformative and restorative potential of water as a metaphor, a force, and a method.

 About Hera Büyüktaşcıyan

Hera Büyüktaşcıyan ( 1984, İstanbul) In her multidisciplinary practice, uses the notion of absence and invisibility, in order to anchor memory through unseen and forgotten aspects of time & space and architectural memory in reference to ruptures in socio-political histories. Through her sculptures, site specific interventions, drawings and films, Büyüktaşcıyan dives into terrestrial imagination by unearthing patterns of selected narratives and timelines that unfold the material memory of unstable spaces. She graduated from Marmara University, Faculty of Fine Arts, Painting department in 2006. She was awarded the Emerging Artist Prize at the Toronto Biennial of Art in 2019.

Residency programs include:Tate St Ives (2022); Delfina Foundation, London (2014); Villa Waldberta, Munich (2012-13); AIRDrop, Stockholm (2012); Selected exhibitons include: Sydney Biennale (2022) Ancestral Weavings, Tate Modern, London (2022); New Museum Triennial, New York (2021); 3rd. Autostrada Biennale, Kosovo (2021); 2nd Lahore Biennale, Pakistan (2020); 6th Singapore Biennale, Singapore (2019); Toronto Biennale, Canada (2019). The artist lives and works in Istanbul.

About Gwangju Biennale

The Gwangju Biennale was founded in 1995 and is the largest and oldest biennale in Asia. Established to commemorate the Gwangju Democratization Movement and its brutal suppression in 1980, the biennale is dedicated to creating dialogues between artistic visions from around the world, shedding light on practices that have been overlooked in the past, while honouring the challenges inscribed within the city’s fabric. The Gwangju Biennale Foundation is a non-profit initiative for contemporary discourse and culture relying on local and international public and private funding.