MOMENTUM AiR Artist-in-Residence Open Studios at Kunstquartier Bethanien, Berlin, Germany.
Alysha Creighton & Hale Ekinci
23 JULY 2016 @ 1-5pm
Performance & Artist Talk @ 3pm
@ MOMENTUM
Kunstquartier Bethanien
Mariannenplatz 2, 10997 Berlin Kreuzberg
"During her Residency at MOMENTUM and her international travels, Hale Ekinci photographs homes, habitats, architecture, statues, and people from all aspects of life and collages them into mixed-media drawings. Through the combination of illustration with digital collage transfers of these photos, she crafts colourful and symbolic pattern-based images on paper. Cultural traditions, political issues, mutated memories, idioms, and translations are the backbone of her work. Personal experiences and current social issues embellished with made-up Kafkaesque details along with old shamanistic rituals make the basis of the non-linear stories she tells in her work. She creates interconnected forms that combine the reality of daily life at different locales in a way that intertwines different people, architecture and sociopolitical issues, using mixed-media drawings that explore these relationships through visual metaphor. In a way she translates each culture’s narratives of the human condition into visual concoctions that together reimagine and guide a connected global human experience.
Applying similar techniques of collage to the moving image, Ekinci is also working on the video art project “Almanci (Germaner)” for her Residency work at MOMENTUM. Based on an original story she wrote during her time in Berlin, the video takes place at a Turkish traditional ceremony of “asking permission to marry”, and explores the stereotypes of Turkish immigrant identity as seen from both Turkish and German perspectives. Using a combination of field video, green screen, still images, and drawings, she crafts a magical realist world where family relations, identity stereotypes, rituals, and women’s issues result in a tense scene that reflects the universal bizarreness of traditions and stereotypes."