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mahalla events

Close to the Village – Kasabaya Yakın

 

Site specific Charcoal Drawing by Larissa Araz

 

Location: Ioakimion Girls High School

15.11.2024 – 30.11.2024

From the final years of the Ottoman Empire to the establishment of the Republic of Turkey (1840-1923), many colonialist and imperialist scientists and missionaries came to the Ottoman territories of the time to research the region’s geography, nature, and socio-political structure. Many of these researchers made significant discoveries by studying species that had not previously been recorded in Western scientific literature, particularly in Anatolia and Mesopotamia. Among these discoveries were species belonging to the animal class with Latin names such as Vulpes Vulpes Kurdistanica (Satunin, 1906), Ovis Armeniana (Blyth, 1840), and Capreolus Capreolus Armenius (Blackler, 1919).

In 2005, the Ministry of Environment and Forestry of the Republic of Turkey removed the words ‘Armenia(n)’ and ‘Kurdistan’ from the taxonomic names of these three endangered animal species and replaced them with ‘Anatolian’ and ‘Eastern’. These names were changed from Vulpes Vulpes Kurdistanica to Vulpes Vulpes, from Ovis Armeniana to Ovis Orientalis Anatolicus, and from Capreolus Capreolus Armenius to Capreolus Cuprelus Capreolus. In a statement published by the Ministry on March 4, 2005, it was declared that the original names were “divisive and contrary to Turkish unity.”

In her work entitled “In Hoc Signo Vinces” (Reign in this sign, imperialist slogan of the Christian emperors in early Christianity), Larissa Araz examined the various steps of how nature is incorporated into ideologically based typologies through pseudo-scientific designations and depictions, which also occur in representative art and literature. A critique of the language of dominance that is typical of imperialist and nationalist discourses.

 

 

For Mahalla Memento, Larissa Araz draws parts of a landscape on a board from the Ioakimion School. The motif looks like a composition of the vulnerable and abandoned. A forest clearing, as if devastated by a storm, toppled gravestones of Sufi sheikhs, a fox looking directly at the viewer as if they were part of the composition and directly involved.

The language of dominance is hacked, temporarily, inviting to try a memory reset to free the mind from certain typologies and a dualism of knowledge.

Larissa Araz (Istanbul, 1990) is an artist and founder of Poşe artist-run space in Istanbul, Turkey. She studied Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, NY, USA and Visual Arts at Koç University in Istanbul, TR.

Araz focuses on alternative histories, non-human witnesses, and the construction of dominant ideologies through institutional knowledge production. Through personal narratives, she researches documents, archives, ruins, silences, traces, and memories that are not included in, or kept hidden from social memory. Between reality and fiction, she tries to discuss possible futures and unrevealed pasts. She uses different mediums in her practice, but focuses on text and image-making.

 

 


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