A Look at Göbekli Tepe from Exhibition Dynamics

The "Exhibition Dynamics" talk at The Circle on 17 January discusses the "Hollows and Mounds: A Look at Göbekli Tepe" exhibition currently running at Ara Güler Museum and Leica Gallery. "Exhibition Dynamics," an Atölye Mil project, is planned to discuss the dynamics, participants, roles and spatial decisions that occur from the moment an exhibition concept emerges to its installation phase where visitors encounter it. At the second event in the "Exhibition Dynamics" series taking place at The Circle on 17 January, the exhibition "Hollows and Mounds: A Look at Göbekli Tepe" — comprising photographs, videos, paintings and installations produced by visual artist Sinem Dişli, who has long conducted research on the Euphrates River, Urfa and its surroundings — will be examined. The talk will open for discussion many different layers: how an artist's exhibition idea interacts with two institutions, how it becomes spatialised; how the artist's conceptual approach becomes physical through various actors' involvement in the process, how it is transferred to new representation tools (a book and the space itself) and thereby opened to experience. The discussion can also be described as an excavation into the concealed processes of the "Hollows and Mounds: A Look at Göbekli Tepe" exhibition that extend from idea to experience. Speakers from various fields — including curators, artists, exhibition designers, researchers, and communications and education programme managers — will examine and discuss different layers of the processes. Visual Artist Sinem Dişli, Exhibition Designer Architect & Interior Architect Mert Zafer Kara and Conservation Specialist Evren Kıvançer of the Ara Güler Archive and Research Centre will serve as speakers, while Exhibition Designer, Architect Dilara Tekin Gezginti and Architect Eda Özgener Semerci will moderate the talk. The talk is held under the sponsorship of Konuşma Avcı Architects.

Hollows and Mounds: A Look at Göbekli Tepe

With this exhibition, Sinem Dişli, bringing together her research of the past ten years on the Mesopotamian region and the Euphrates River, which encompasses her native city Urfa, focuses on Göbekli Tepe, the monumental structure built approximately twelve thousand years ago by hunter-gatherers who shaped limestone, basalt and flint. The artist investigates Göbekli Tepe and the region's multilayered past, history and soil layers through a language that moves between documentary and fiction. She examines in depth the earth's complexity, the cycles in humanity's relationship with stone and water containing millions of years of life sediments, and the ongoing interactions today. By tracing the origins of daily rituals in ancient times, she seeks clues that could enable reinterpretation of history and development of new approaches to our relationship with our surroundings. By observing how fields such as archaeology and geology address the fragile cycles of life, how we read and construct history through stone, she observes the spaces, actions and games we create by striking stone against stone, and examines how we perceive the universe and temporality. Embracing the limitations of photography, she creates open-ended connections between time, space and living beings, proceeding from how we perceive dualities such as underground and above ground, earth and sky, past and present, night and day within photography's ambiguous nature. "Hollows and Mounds: A Look at Göbekli Tepe," the first joint project of Ara Güler Museum and Leica Gallery Istanbul, can be visited at both venues between 16 September 2019 and 15 February 2020.

Speakers:

Sinem Dişli, Visual Artist Mert Zafer Kara, Exhibition Designer, Architect & Interior Architect Evren Kıvançer, Ara Güler Archive and Research Centre, Conservation Specialist

Moderators:

Dilara Tekin Gezginti, Exhibition Designer, Architect Eda Özgener Semerci, Architect