Pia Rönicke and Zeynel Abidin Kızılyaprak
Travel Stories
8 June – 20 July 2008
Opening 7 June 2008, 18.00
Travel Stories is a collaborative project produced for Casco by Danish artist Pia Rönicke, Kurdish writer Zeynel Abidin Kizilyaprak, which thinks about the nature of how stories are shared, heard and retold. The exhibition is centered around the film Facing, which the artist and writer co-directed in Istanbul in January 2008.
Rönicke met Kizilyaprak at the Villa Aurora in Los Angeles, where he was participating in their writer in exile programme. Some months later, she invited him to collaborate with her on a film dealing with questions around the Kurdish situation – something that he has written extensively about, both through journalism and fiction. The starting point of Facing is Kizilyaprak’s short story Knock…Knock…Knock…, which is based on his experiences of a Turkish torture house. The story is told from the perspective of its writer from a present day position, depicting a meeting between the storyteller and a character in the story. The film moves between fiction and the reenactment of the author’s own story, and is interspersed with archival footage that gives the story an otherwise unspecified political reality.
An Usual Story from a Nameless Country
Discussion 7 June 2008, 16.00
Pia Rönicke and Zeynel Abidin Kizilyaprak will talk about the process of making the film and about Kurdish history from a personal perspective.
Supported by Gemeente Utrecht, Mondriaan Stichting, Danish Arts Council. Facing is additionally supported by Andersen’s Contemporary Art, Copenhagen and gb agency, Paris.
Travel Stories will also be shown as part of U-TURN Quadrennial for Contemporary Art, Copenhagen (5 September – 9 November 2008) and in an upcoming solo exhibition by Pia Rönicke at gb agency, Paris (13 September – 8 November 2008).
