Artist Hera Büyüktaşçıyan’s installation Reveries of an Underground Forest (2019), reflects on the notion of invisible foundations of lost spaces, implying movements of people through history to retrace the lost fragments of social and personal narratives. Through a performance, musician and artist Keerat Kaur relates to the installation in song, recollecting the Punjabi Folk Music musical tradition and transforming it through her own personal motifs. The performance is followed by a conversation between the two artists moderated by curator Tairone Bastien, reflecting on mutual narratives of belonging and fluid collective memories.
Image Credit: Hera Büyüktaşcıyan, “Reveries of an Underground Forest,” 2019. Courtesy of the artist.
Bios
Hera Büyüktaşcıyan (born in 1984, Istanbul, Turkey) is an artist with a multidisciplinary practice who considers notions of absence and invisibility with the aquatic nature of memory, time and space. Selected local and international exhibitions include the New Museum Triennial, New York (2021); the 3rd Autostrada Biennial, Kosovo (2021); the British Museum, London (2021); On Stones and Palimpsests, Green Art Gallery, Dubai (2020); the Lahore Biennial 02, Pakistan (2020); the 6th Singapore Biennial (2019); IFA Galerie, Berlin (2019); the national pavilion of Armenia, 56th Venice Biennale (2015); and The Jerusalem Show VII, Jerusalem (2014). In 2019, she received the Emerging Artist Prize at the Toronto Biennial.
Keerat Kaur (born and lives in Toronto and London, ON, Canada) is an artist and artisan who works through painting, music, and architecture. She draws her creativity from Indic philosophies and creates surrealist imagery with underlying themes of spirituality and fantasia, while employing an aesthetic that evokes a dream-like quality. She received her BA in 2012 and her Master of Architecture in 2016.