Hera Büyüktaşcıyan

Tate St Ives | Cornwall, United Kingdom

As part of SAHA's collaboration with Tate St Ives in 2020, Hera Büyüktaşcıyan's solo exhibition Earthbound Whisperers is between 27 May – 15 October 2023. The opening includes artist talk with the museum’s director Anne Barlow. A parallel version of this installation is shown at the 14th Gwangju Biennale until 9 July 2023.

Inspired by the Nine Maidens standing stones in Cornwall, the artist surveys the underlying dynamics of surface and invisibility through these anthropomorphic monoliths. 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 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.

Büyüktaşcıyan references these social and environmental histories of Cornwall in her use of textile, graphite (a stone powder), sound and upright forms. Her sculpted fabric forms embody lithic (stone-like) surfaces concealed within the drapes and folds, symbolic of archaeological strata and imaginary landscapes. Considering human traces evident within nature, Earthbound Whisperers vocalises histories hidden deep within landscapes and politics of invisibility and erasure. Through this composition, Büyüktaşcıyan not only explores human traces in nature, but also the politics of invisibility and the accumulated histories within.

Hera Büyüktaşcıyan (1984, İstanbul) In her multidisciplinary practice, Hera Büyüktaşcıyan 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. 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. Some of the artist residency programs she participated in include: Tate St Ives (2022); Delfina Foundation, London (2014); Villa Waldberta, Munich (2012-13); AIRDrop, Stockholm (2012).Group exhibitions include:14th Gwangju Biennale (2023), Sydney Biennale (2022) Ancestral Weavings, Tate Modern, London (2022); New Museum Triennial, New York (2021), 3rd Autostrada Biennial, Kosovo (2021); 2nd Lahore Biennial, Pakistan (2020); 6th Singapore Biennial, Singapore (2019); Toronto Biennial, Canada (2019).

About Tate St Ives

The Tate Gallery, St Ives opened in June 1993 and in just six months welcomed over 120,000 visitors – 50,000 more than the original target for the entire year. Since then, the gallery has been an outstanding success with an average of 240,000 visitors per year. Evans and Shalev, who are also architects of the Tate Gallery, designed the changes to the existing building. Jamie Fobert Architects were commissioned to create the new extension which doubled the size of the exhibition space, increased facilities and added new art handling facilities.