SANDSTORM : AND THEN THERE WAS DUST, AT DEPO ISTANBUL

SANDSTORM : AND THEN THERE WAS DUST, AT DEPO ISTANBUL

Sinem Dişli has emphasised the borderlessness of ecological challenges in her work Manufacturing of the Familiar and Sand in a Whirlwind. Dişli depicts the ecological inequality between Iraq and Syria on one side and Turkey on the other side as the result of Turkey's excessive dam construction projects on the Euphrates River. The absence of vegetation or trees in much of the region offers the storm a space to move and allows it to grow unhindered, both in size and speed. The work Fields on Fire narrates the moment right before the Wind arrived. Disli was documenting stubble burning, a traditional agricultural technique, where fire is set intentionally to the straw stubble that remains after harvest.

Exhibition view, Mahmoud Obaidi, Turtles, 2005 (l), Sinem Dişli, Fields On Fire, 2015 (r), photo: Kayhan Kaygusuz

SANDSTORM : AND THEN THERE WAS DUST, AT DEPO ISTANBUL

Exhibition view, Sinem Dişli, Manufacturing Of The Familiar, 2015, photo: Kayhan Kaygusuz

SANDSTORM : AND THEN THERE WAS DUST, AT DEPO ISTANBUL

In his installation Turtles, Canadian-Iraqi artist Mahmoud Obaidi honors the complexity of interweaving cross-creature destinies by placing twenty turtles made of sand as symbolic stand-ins for the more-than-three million Iraqis displaced by violence since the First Gulf War. The turtles, once plentiful, are now on the verge of extinction due to chemical waste. Like the region’s humans, they are being forced to disappear from a homeland marked by immeasurable loss. Uranium Generation Design highlights the concepts of “anomaly" and “deformity”. He follows the footprints of the uranium particles in Iraq to show how these uranium particles, as a legacy of endless wars, have deformed plants and animals, as well as the people (mostly children) of Iraq.

Exhibition view, Mahmoud Obaidi, Uranium Generation Design, 2020, photo: Kayhan Kaygusuz

SANDSTORM : AND THEN THERE WAS DUST, AT DEPO ISTANBUL

Negar Farajiani's Green Corners is an artivist collaborative handling of the present moment. The project’s main subject is environmental education in urban as well as rural areas of Iran. For Sandstorm – And Then There Was Dust Farajiani organized workshops in Tehran as well as Yazd, Bam, and in the village Darzikola in the Hyrcanian forests. Farajiani initiates relationships between children in Tehran and other places by creating and extending a network with plants and letters, which she lets the children take care of (writing, repotting, watering) as active network With this exchange of letters and regional plants, she seeks to provoke an expansion of the conceptual cosmos and perception change in the children’s relationships to their and other environments and to other people.

Exhibition view, Negar Farajiani, Green Corners, 2020, photo: Kayhan Kaygusuz

SANDSTORM : AND THEN THERE WAS DUST, AT DEPO ISTANBUL

In their piece Al Mashoof Tehran Platform attempts to digitally represent some elements of the endangered cultural heritage of the people who live in Hoor Al-Azim, hoping that it may help to preserve parts of this cultural DNA. The idea comes from small boats called Al- Mashoof, which “connect" people from different parts of the region. They aim to show how the impossibility of the boats to connect people as a result of the drying up of Hoor Al-Azim can accelerate the destruction of this cultural heritage.

Exhibition view, Tehran Platform, Al Mashoof, 2020, photo: Kayhan Kaygusuz

SANDSTORM : AND THEN THERE WAS DUST, AT DEPO ISTANBUL

Kerem Ozan Bayraktar brings together several narratives in which particles migrate from one location to the other. Dust itself is accumulated through cycles of growth, decay, conflict, and repose. By bringing forward micro and macro journeys of dust and happenings at sites of varying sizes (a box, a home, a desert, a galaxy). In his works How does a Vacuum Cleaner work? and Rotor Bayraktar also highlights the non hierarchical qualities of dust.

Exhibition view, Kerem Ozan Bayraktar, How Does A Vacuum Cleaner Work?, 2020, photo: Kayhan Kaygusuz

SANDSTORM : AND THEN THERE WAS DUST, AT DEPO ISTANBUL

Exhibition view, Kerem Ozan Bayraktar, Rotor, 2020, photo: Kayhan Kaygusuz

SANDSTORM : AND THEN THERE WAS DUST, AT DEPO ISTANBUL

Ayat Najafi's Planting Gilgamesh is a contemporary interpretation of one of the oldest pieces of writing ever found, the Gilgamesh epic. The installation includes audio readings of the old text in Akkadian and Sumerian by scholars of Ancient Middle Eastern Studies, as well as interpretations of parts of the text by the exhibition’s participating artists. A video is projected on water with either the audio of the old texts or the artists performances play. Najafi knits together a network of past and present, one that is geographically spread over Turkey, Iraq, and Iran.

Exhibition view, Ayat Najafi, Planting Gilgamesh, 2020, photo: Kayhan Kaygusuz

SANDSTORM : AND THEN THERE WAS DUST, AT DEPO ISTANBUL

In December 2018 Ayat Najafi and Sarah Maske conducted a workshop titled “Ecological Art and Film” in cooperation with kirkayak kültür in Gaziantep. On the second workshop day we asked the participants to tell their own regional ecological stories, ideas for art works and film. Six of these stories are presented here in the exhibition.

Exhibition view, Ayat Najafi, Planting Gilgamesh, 2020, photo: Kayhan Kaygusuz

SANDSTORM : AND THEN THERE WAS DUST, AT DEPO ISTANBUL

In their piece Loss of Habitat birbuçuk applies stories to the artworks by means of an audiopiece which collects theories, spoken images, and stories by scientists, scholars, and others working around ecological, geological, and activist topics. Thus bringing about a network of visual and spoken narrative forms in a form of a cacophony.

Exhibition view, birbuçuk collective, Loss Of Habitat, 2020, photo: Kayhan Kaygusuz

SANDSTORM : AND THEN THERE WAS DUST, AT DEPO ISTANBUL

The Sandstorm-Network by Elisabeth Déak and Sarah Maske is a developing network which connects the participating artists with keywords which are particularly important to the exhibition and the artworks. It also reflects the difficulty to grasp the entanglement as whole but allows the viewer to pursue some of the connections up close.

Exhibition view, Elisabeth Deák and Sarah Maske, Network design, 2020, photo: Kayhan Kaygusuz