At the heart of Hera Büyüktaşcıyan’s work lies a deep interest in memory and architecture, with attention to the interplay between the visible and the invisible. Her research on the lost waters of Kosovo has generated a flowing continuity toward a new form of My Eye’s Pupil Is Your Nest (2021), her work for the 3rd Autostrada Biennale. After tracing an imaginary water line on the cliffs under the castle of Prizren, the installation finds new life in Prishtina, running within the walls of the Brick Factory. As a former site of production, providing construction material to many of the buildings in the city, it fostered a modernist propulsion to growth that led to the loss of rivers that were falsely considered dysfunctional. Five aquatic sources, resurfacing an unexpected flow within one of the oldest landmarks of the city center, become grounds for reflection on the material poetics of brick and the waves of people who worked in the factory. In its bond with clay and the terrestrial, water simultaneously represents an element of creation and erosion, investing every block with new narratives and the continuous transformation of its shape with time. Through her work, whose title is borrowed from Kathleen Raine’s poem “Self,” Büyüktaşcıyan offers a meditation on the aquatic nature of the act of building and erasure in cyclic repetition through poetic contrast. In so doing, she exposes two elements that shape our collective memories and the ways in which histories are written and conceived.

Hera Büyüktaşcıyan (1984) was born in Istanbul and lives and works in Istanbul.

Text by Giovanni Giacomo Paolin