SAHA Talks | TAKLAK - Dilşad Aladağ

Dilşad Aladağ’s performance project TAKLAK, which has been in development since 2021, will be presented once again on Saturday, February 15, at SAHA Studio.

TAKLAK

A plant among plants. A companion. The carrier of the Aegean landscape, the Taurus Mountains air, the sounds of Istanbul, and the dreams and myths wandering around the Eastern Mediterranean.

That plant is Taklak, known by many other names such as Zamzarik, Koutsoupia, Arguvan, Dara Cihûda, Judah Tree, Redbud or Cercis Siliquastrum. While longing for a land, sea and air, I left behind in 2021, Taklak became a companion to me. In Germany, a new setting where I was striving to belong to, they seeped into my dreams, as well as my fears. They took me to the new spheres in each and every turn.

The project, TAKLAK, registers this journey. It travels among archives, follows the footsteps of the botanists merged in landscape, pays visit to various plants, searches for the different representations of a plant, and explores the dreams and myths of the lands along the coasts of the Eastern Mediterranean. Thinking about and around how a plant can create intercultural belonging, Taklaks are transformed from objects of nostalgia to companions of resilience.

The journey is not only about findings and meetings but also about loss and exclusion. It wanders around the duality of being in parallel universes, belonging or not belonging. It searches for the dualities of destructive progress, and self-othering, which are the trajectories of the geography I grew up in and around.

As an artistic and archival research, it traverses the fields of etymology, ecology, and botany while dealing with the representations of unknown territories, climates, and languages. This is a story of gathering. This is a story of foraging. Seeds, names, meanings, symbols, stories, testimonies, and memories in notebooks, boxes, and bags are rooted and unrooted, spreading around and spinning around in this story and exploring the resilience of artistic inquiries.

Dilşad Aladağ is a researcher and practitioner whose work spans cultural, artistic, and curatorial fields. Her current works centre on understanding the complexity of transformations with an emphasis on spatial and ecological subjects and the performances of power and resilience. Her collaborative and individual practices such as the Mahsul [Yield] Project were supported by various grants including the SALT Research Funds, Prince Claus Seeds Awards, and CultureCIVIC Grassroots Program. These practices have been shown on diverse platforms such as Kunsthaus Hamburg, DEPO Istanbul, Franconia Jewish Museum, SALT, Daadgalerie, and SAVVY Contemporary Berlin. Dilşad is pursuing her doctorate research at the Bauhaus University Weimar, Arts and Design Program. She will be a residency artist at IASPIS Stockholm in 2025 spring.