Halil Atasever's (VACD MA '14) performance in Contemporary Istanbul 2015

The Nest / Yuva

“We have a great similarity with birds. Both of us are making an effort to make a place “ours” which actually does not belong to us and from where we will leave soon. Today, when an hotel room becomes “the nest” for us for few days, how much our homes “belong to us”?

The Nest / Yuva is a performance primarily investigates the terms of immigration, ownership and temporariness on the ideological level and “a nest” tried to be created on physical level.

FROM THE CURATOR:

THE SOFA PERFORMANCES is a project that Marcus Graf developed in collaboration with The Sofa Hotel especially for Contemporary Istanbul. It aims at giving emerging performance artists the opportunity to share their work with a wide audience. Getting the chance to perform, and gaining recognition within the scene are still difficult tasks, as due to sociological reasons, as well as obstacles in the contexts of our field’s education, mediation and economy, performance art is in Turkey still the underdog of the scene. That is why THE SOFA PERFORMANCES, besides meaning an experimental way of presenting performance art, supports the visibility and discussion of this important discipline in order to propel its further spread and development. 
For the performance artist, besides the body as material, instrument and framework of an artistic concept, the moment and place of the actual work is of fundamental importance. The authenticity and reality of the performatif process, in which the artist directly shares his time and location with the spectator, is the reason for its unique aura. For underlining the matter of locality, we have chosen to create a synthesis of a white cube and a hotel room, in which every day, a different artist executes a performance from the morning to the evening. During this rather long duration of the performance, the artists deal with the experience of time, the interrelationship between space and the body, as well as issues about privacy, and publicness. The space, which is characterized through furniture from the actual Sofa Hotel, is filled with associations of travelling, and temporality, as well as feelings about belonging and unfamiliarity. 
In the end, every day at THE SOFA PERFORMANCES, another artist takes his place in the proverbial “gallery-room” for getting in interaction with this extraordinary spatial situation, and for commenting on the crazy world we all live in by creating his personal versions and icons of reality. 

Artists
Hacer Kıroğlu (11.11.2015)
Buğra Erol (12.11.2015)
Orhan Cem Çetin (13.11.2015)
Halil Atasever (14.11.2015)
Burçak Konukman (15.11.2015)

Curator
Marcus Graf

Assistant Curator
Melike Bayık