Contemporary arts programme of the 3rd edition of Cappadox Festival
May 18–June 11, 2017
Pozitif is pleased to announce the third year of Cappadox, the definitive Cappadocia experience, a progressive multi-disciplinary cultural festival that brings a host of international and local contemporary art, music, nature and outdoor programmes together. Set in the dramatic landscape of Cappadocia in Central Anatolia, Cappadox 2017 will take place between May 18–21.
Cappadox 2017 sets out with the theme Ways Out From The World through which diverse fields of the festival will intersect with each other.
Ways Out From The World
Ongoing wars… mass migrations… social discontent with current systems and governances… global environmental warnings… We are going through such times that there seems almost no possible way out. Many of us feel locked in time, bearing with what is going on.
The Ways Out From The World is a quotation from the author, the poet and the artist Sami Baydar’s book of the same title from 1990. “Only the children who are locked up in the rooms know the ways out from the world,”(1) writes Baydar in his fragmentary narrative, intensifying the relations between poetry, story and theatrical play. Baydar points out to strict limitations of physical setting as something that opens up the imagination, which can go beyond and even transform the factual reality we are living in. In despairing circumstances of impossibility and impotence of action, Baydar proposes the poetic act—act of making meaning/making the world—as a vigorous enactment of emancipation, directly referencing to the realm of imaginary, the ways that art can open up.
Today, the already existing theories, formulas, strategies or tactics fall short of capacity to ignite substantial change. Informed by the urgency of undoing the ways we know, we feel the urge to imagine and invent unprecedented “languages” to conceive the world-to-come. As opposed to the factual reality, Ways Out From The World intends to conjure up desire for what has not yet emerged, not yet been visible and has yet to come.
In this sense, art can propose novel languages, creative forms, unorthodox methods and practices to open up the imaginary. Cappadox 2017 contemporary art program will explore the distinct ways of the poetic act, “making the world” in the heart of the inspiring and complex geography of Cappadocia, by and large Anatolia. Excavating their unique ways out from the world, the invited artists will bring out proposals which encompass issues like voicing the possibility of an equal companionship with other species on Earth, or introducing a new planet to move into.
All in all, Ways Out From The World does not refer to the escapist strategies, but it is rather an invitation to get as courageous as the imagination goes.
The art programme of Cappadox 2017 curated by Fulya Erdemci and Kevser Güler (Associate Curator) will be realized between May 18 and June 11, 2017, with the participation of 20 international artists and collaborators with site-specific and context-responsive new productions. Additionally, there will be film screenings and gatherings, articulating literature and contemporary art through poetry readings, as well as talks and conversations with artists, musicians, poets and writers.
To see the 2015 and 2016 editions of Cappadox Contemporary Art programme, click here.
(1) Sami Baydar, Dünyadan Çıkış Yolları, Cumartesi Yayınları, Istanbul, 1990. p 84.
