[spectre] Extracts from “Eclipsed Voices”, Open Space, Vienna, 10 March - 2 April 2010

[Basak Senova]

Extracts from “Eclipsed Voices”, 10 March - 2 April 2010

Opening: 9 March 2010, 7 pm
Project curator: Başak Şenova
Participating artists:
Erhan Muratoğlu
Sala-Manca

Book presentation: 9 March 2010, 7 pm

Eclipsed Voices

The “Eclipsed Voices” is a long-term research-based art project,  
detecting works, whose subject matters coincide with memory and alter  
diverse issues of social, political, cultural, and economic aspects of  
our daily life. Each work, in its own way, has the restrained  
intention of trying to understand the local realities that surround us  
and shape our identity. All together communicates some off-the-record  
information about various conditions and realities. Hence, the “off- 
the-record” narratives have the potential to generate voids in the  
vortex of registered histories.

This collection of works touches upon the issues of the control of the  
memory as each work clearly manifests how individual stories about the  
past interact with existing narratives and other forms of remembrance.

“NİGÂR” (2005 – 2010)
by ERHAN MURATOGLU

The work is based on a casual talk with a 94-year-old woman, who had  
migrated from Bulgaria to Turkey when she was young. Her personal  
collection of photographs implies disparate hints of her life, while  
she is sharing her fragmented personal memories. “Nigar” refrains  
from any immersive storytelling as Muratoglu perceptibly had no  
intention to build any intimacy with the subject. Yet, the sincere  
memories build fascinating links to the unofficial and untold history  
of the 20th century.


“ELEPHANTS IN THE NIGHTS OF METULA” (2005 – 2010)
by SALA-MANCA

“Elephants in the Nights of Metula” is an installation that  
includes video, digital slides, film, animation and two voices in  
Yiddish and English. The work is based on texts of the Yiddish poet  
Avraham Sutzkever and deals with the harsh israeli cultural control  
policies of the 50's towards jewish diaspora cultures, in a process of  
hegemonization of a new Hebrew culture.

Elephants in the Nights of Metula is a continuation of the research on  
the gap between the written letter (the text), its voiced expression,  
the body and the icon, and on visual, cultural and sound translations  
in the electronic realm.

Info on artists:
Erhan Muratoglu is an interactive designer and digital artist. He is  
specialised in motion graphics design and audio-visual design. He  
studied industrial design (Bachelor of ID, Middle East Technical  
University) and graphic design (MFA in Graphic Design, Bilkent  
University). He worked and exhibited in Turkey, Europe, the UK, and  
the US with his computer generated projects, and received awards in  
festivals for his experimental videos. He has been writing on design,  
technology, art and media for various publications, since 1992.  
Recently, he was a lecturer in the Dept. of Communication Design,  
Kadir Has University in Istanbul. He is one of the founding members of  
NOMAD, an association working on digital art and culture. He is in the  
organizing committee of ctrl_alt_del sound-art project.

Sala-Manca is a group of independent Jerusalem-based artists that  
creates in different fields: performance, video, installation & new  
media since 2000. Sala-manca’s works deal with the poetics of  
translation (cultural, mediatic and social), with textual, urban and  
net contexts and with the tensions between low tech and high tech  
aesthetics, as well as social and political issues.

supported by:

BM:UKK
ERSTE Foundation
Stadt Wien - Kulturabteilung MA 7
Anadolu Kültür

Open Space
Zentrum für Kunstprojekte
Lassingleithnerplatz 2
A- 1020 Vienna
Austria
(+43) 699 115 286 32
for more info: office at openspace-zkp.org
http://www.openspace-zkp.org