Hera Büyüktaşcıyan: Neither on the Ground, nor in the Sky

Hera Büyüktaşcıyan’s solo exhibition Neither on the Ground, nor in the Sky, curated by Nat Muller, is a response to ifa-Galerie Berlin’s one-year programme Untie to Tie - Movement.Bewegung.

The exhibition comprises newly commissioned works that poetically explore what migration, cultural heritage, belonging and displacement mean. The project is inspired by a floor mosaic in Berlin’s Pergamon Museum known as the Alexandrine Parakeet Mosaic (160–150 BC) that was taken from the ancient Palace of Pergamon (now Bergama in Turkey). While the provenance and ownership of antiquities and colonial artefacts is currently debated extensively in academia and museum circles—this forms the political backdrop to the project—Büyüktaşcıyan broadens these notions and takes us on a journey that traverses time and place by touching on universal sensibilities such as loss, identity, and history.

The exhibition title alludes to the neighbourhood adjacent to the Pergamon excavation site, where some of the houses are built on a bridge, thus appearing to be suspended between earth and sky, like a bird perched on a tree. The figure of the Alexandrine parakeet is a motif that resonates throughout the works. It bears witness to change and the way in which this once powerful and glorious city has now been transformed into a populous urban centre, which still retains traces of its past. In this respect, the bird occupies a time and space that is liminal space, neither on the ground, nor in the sky, neither in the past nor in the present.

Through video, sculptures and mixed media installations Büyüktaşcıyan offers us in Neither on the Ground, nor in the Sky a temporality that is non-linear, a place that is liminal, and allows us to travel through history while turning us to our unruly present.

Hera Büyüktaşcıyan (b. 1984 Istanbul) lives and works in Istanbul and Athens. Her practice explores issues of identity, memory, history, time and space. She often draws on metaphors from local myths and on historic and iconographic elements of various geographies to tell the untold.

Nat Muller is an independent curator and writer based between Birmingham and Amsterdam. She has written extensively on art from the Middle East. Nat Muller has been appointed curator of the Danish Pavilion for the 58th Venice Biennale. She is an AHRC-funded PhD researcher at Birmingham City University.

Neither on the Ground, nor in the Sky is part of ifa-Galerie Berlin’s research and exhibition programme Untie to Tie (2017–2020) that reflects on the mental and territorial colonial legacies in contemporary societies and their impact on movement, migration and environment.