“A Year of 13 Moons ”
Scenes from a recent past and a distant future
Halida Boughriet, Nicolas Descottes, Anne-Charlotte Finel, Noémie Goudal, Berat Işık Yusuf Sevinçli
15.09-23.10.2021
Curator: Yekhan Pınarlıgil
Autoportrait/ Self-portrait (3’15, 2009) and Action, 2003 /6’, DV PAL, W&B, Sound /Collection: Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris – ©halidaboughriet / Courtesy of the Artist and Galerist.
“Every one of seven years is a lunar year. In these years, people who are dominated by their emotions suffer from severe depression. But when a lunar year is also a year of 13 moons, like 1978, it often results in personal catastrophes.” -The opening monologue of In a Year of 13 Moons by R. W. Fassbinder We have built the world upon time and time upon the Moon and the Sun. Two contradicting cycles, two different concepts of time that do not overlap, and it is as if we are caught in the middle. The Moon navigates around us, descending and escalating time and again. The Sun has wrapped the Earth around its waist like a hula hoop, swaying it between day and night. We are in a year of 13 moons, right in the middle of the 13th full moon. It feels like it has begun without an end. A little before the past, within the last remains of memory; a bit later than the future, right before the end of the world. We are on the Earth’s surface, right in the middle of a desert, at a place like nowhere. We are watching the ruins from another time with eyes open wide, the wreck of civilization scattered all over. Here and there are a few traces, a few lines, freezing cold weather, sculpturesque remains from an enchanting structure, lonely but majestic ruins, a monochrome scenery that melts and disappears into the background, animals lost on their tracks, people gone astray, myths withering among languages in between disappearance and remembrance.
“All worldly shapes shall melt in gloom,
The Sun himself must die,
Before this mortal shall assume
Its Immortality!
I saw a vision in my sleep
That gave my spirit strength to sweep
Adown the gulf of Time!
I saw the last of human mould,
That shall Creation’s death behold,
As Adam saw her prime!” [1]
Also find the virtual tour of the exhibition in this link; https://galerist.com.tr/
This exhibition is of an undated intuition, perhaps a post-apocalyptic landscape, an uncanny geography, a state of anxiety, a cold conceptual nightmare. An assumption of the past, a messenger from the future. Perhaps there has been a war, unsubstantiated like all others. Or maybe an undefinable chaos, a violent destruction. Perhaps the course of humanity has ended up in a cul-de-sac, as we marched ahead blindly, solemn and courageous, yet ignorant and impertinent. What follows is a head-spinning abyss. We enter the 13th moon from the edge of a cliff, through the vague doors of time. It remains ambiguous whether there is way out, or whether the year will eventually come to an end. The constructs proposed by the artists in the exhibition harbor an enchanting feeling of the uncanny, and thoughts of loneliness that accompany it. The existential loneliness of humanity floating in the infinite emptiness of space, or the feeling of alienation in the middle of a crowded city. The undefinable tension caused by finding oneself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Within these extraordinary scenes, the exhibition invites us to to silently turn back to ourselves and to question our own time. In these strange times prone to disaster, art becomes a field of exploration for reconstruction. Until the next year of 13 moons…
Galerist proudly presents A Year of 13 Moons curated by Yekhan Pınarlıgil, exhibiting works by Halida Boughriet, Nicolas Descottes, Anne-Charlotte Finel, Noémie Goudal, Berat Işık and Yusuf Sevinçli. The exhibition will be on display from September 15 to October 23, 2021.
[1] Thomas Campbell, ‘The Last Man’
Ruine, Part 1, Gradishte, 2020 ©halidaboughriet
Photography, concrete blocks, sound
When the Globe is Home
Treviso, 3rd July / 29th November 2020
To communicate humanity’s ancestral and instinctive need to transform even the least welcoming space imaginable – a forced labour camp in Albania during the dictatorship – into a liveable andpersonal environment, Halida Boughriet, a French artist of Algerian descent, created Ruine I, Gradishte for Gallerie delle Prigioni, an installation composed of concrete blocks and a series of photographs and portraits of people confined to this place of punishment. The work includes the voice of a woman who lived in Gradishte until the age of 17 and who continues to view it as the home of her childhood and adolescence.
Ruine attempts to reinvent the notion of living in a closed and isolated space. The place of reference is a forced-labor concentration camp built in the 1950s in Gradishte, Albania, where thousands of deportees and downgraded citizens of the former autocratic Albanian communist regime were forced to live for decades. Gradishte is a ruin today, doomed to general amnesia, though there are people who still live there. Halida Boughriet revives its memories and casts them in concrete. What is it like living in exile in your own country? What if such a place is the only one you recall as your childhood home? The soundtrack plays a poem by a now 45-year-old woman, born and raised until the age of 17 in the Gradishte camp, who tells of her coming back to this place 27 years later.
Claudio Scorretti and Irina Ungureanu
curators of When the Globe is Home
©Fondazione Benetton, ©Gallerie delle Prigioni
The soundtrack : testimonial from Alketa Spahiu
This is a poem, written and said by a now 45 year-old woman, born and
raised until 17 in the Gradishte camp. She tells her coming back in her childhood place, 27 years later.
