Gözde İlkin, Nil Yalter

4th Autostrada Biennale

SAHA supports Nil Yalter’s and Gözde İlkin’s projects in 4th Autostrada Biennale. Curated by Övül Ö.Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza, the exhibition takes place between 7 July – 9 September 2023 in Pristhina, Prizren and Mitrovica. SAHA is also organizing a research trip to the region during the opening period of the biennial for the artists of the SAHA Studio March - September 2023 period.

All Images Will Disappear, One Day is an exhibition about what makes and unmakes us, what entangles and disentangles us from ourselves, about freedoms beyond choices, imaginaries that flow despite and across borders. It is an exhibition about collective autobiographies stored in cultural archives, those deep reservoirs of words, objects, patterns, feelings, or misunderstandings. It is about connecting with the unknown. What is unarchivable reminds us that all images disappear, one day, slipping into a temporal void. Yet art survives as a language of resistance and resilience, a way to validate our existence in the world, a horizon beyond imperial visual regimes. 

Gözde İlkin is participating with her new project titled Companion Plants, Entrusted Stones. The fabrics in our homes carry the imprints of our presence. Their fibers, made of plant, animal, or synthetic material, come into intimate contact with our daily lives. Gözde İlkin works with found domestic textiles as archives of lived history, as well as sites where vibrant figures of human-plant hybrids and more-than-human kinship can potentially emerge. For Refakatçi Bitkiler, Emanet Taşlar/Companion Plants, Entrusted Stones, she asked residents of Prizren to share their bedsheets, curtains, and tablecloths with her. She also researched regional flora and its use in motifs, seeing them as traces or agents of metamorphosis and collective memory. Using natural plant dyes, paint, and embroidery, she has transformed her source materials into a series of large-scale textile works hung on facades throughout the streets of Prizren. They connect the domestic, associated with women’s reproductive labor, to the public sphere, touching on questions of belonging, gender, migration, family, storytelling, and resistance as transformative care.

Nil Yalter’s rarely shown work I AM (1992) , made of a manifesto on her polyphonic identity, is a strong example of the ways artist floats with roots, claiming nomadic against the fixation on categorised identities and histories. I AM as a manifesto, highlighting all the memories and languages embedded in the bodies of women in this part of the world, retraces the routes between Western Balkans, Istanbul and Anatolia and reminds us of many untold stories. Translated in the languages of Prizren, I AM will appear in public spaces of Prizren in different moments of the Biennial alongside the main installation in Shani Effendi House.

Gözde İlkin (1981, Kütahya) works on found domestic fabrics such as tablecloths, curtains, bed sheets, etc. that are representative of social identity, and social processes and that have become objects of memory. Her motifs and drawings on fabrics depict today’s cultural information, political and social relationships, and gender issues.

As materials, first-hand fabrics and motifs keep different memory of the lives in daily use, bringing the main questions about getting around like roots under the feeling of belonging. Her embroidered and painting forms is focusing on the body as an experimental or affective landscape. Imposed, upon individuals as a disciplining practice of the body, how to transform knowledge via objects and phrases constitutes the conceptual knots of her work. She chooses to use abstract forms like roots to depict the body and its experiences with its habitat. Erasing face forms help knit together all beings as plants, animals, and human. These abstract forms remind the roots or various shapes of rhizomes, figures, and landscapes.Recently, Ilkin has started to design fabrics as a stage that she could inhabit via drawing, stitching, and sound. Sound, visual material, and texts she writes constitute the main forms of her works. She thinks about experiences, movement, and affect, about concepts building on to multidisciplinary coexisting when she designs her forms. Ilkin traces nature to discover ways of belonging. Her forms that are inspired by the nature track the healing and transforming effects through plants, animals, and humans drawn closer together.

Nil Yalter (1938, Cairo), A pioneer in the French feminist art movement of the 1970s, she was engaged in dance, theatre and painting during this time, she also practiced pantomime and travelled by foot to India as a pantomime artist. She participated in the French counter culture and revolutionary political movement of the late 1960s, immersing herself in the debates around gender, migrant workers from Turkey, and other issues of the time. These social movements and ethnographic science have influenced the artist’s videos, performances and installations from the 1970s in the form of an idiosyncratic, pluralistic aesthetics. The influence of abstract traditions, especially that of Russian constructivism can be observed in her paintings and digital works since her early years. Nil Yalter’s works reflect a style that blends together all these influences along with autobiographical elements where the personal and the political intertwine. Yalter lives in Paris since 1965. 

About Autostrada Biennale

Autostrada Biennale was established by Leutrim Fishekqiu, Vatra Abrashi and Barış Karamuço in 2014. As the only contemporary art institution in Prizren, Autostrada Biennale functions on two speeds:

Autostrada Biennale
International Contemporary Art exhibition that takes place every two years since 2017

Autostrada Hangar
The new education, production and exhibition space in the former German KFOR military base now ITP (Innovation and Training Park in Prizren).

With the latter, they have extended the publicness of our platform by considering art production as a sustainable form of learning and exchange that will address the needs of the communities. Autostrada’s last edition “What if a Journey…” curated by Ovul O. Durmusoglu and Joanna Warsza held in 2021 was spread in 3 cities, with 20 venues in Prizren, Prishtina and Peja, 32 artists, and around 60,000 visitors during the two months public program, this way contributing in the development of cultural life and cultural tourism.