Flying Too Close To The Sun

The Schwarz Foundation is pleased to announce the exhibition Flying too close to the sun 1, its annual summer exhibition at Art Space Pythagorion, the foundation’s venue in Samos since 2012.

The exhibition brings together two artists, Hera Büyüktaşcıyan and Maria Tsagkari, whose practice is research-based and concerned predominantly with the history and memory of the wider region of the Eastern Mediterranean and especially that of Greece and Turkey in the aftermath of the Ottoman Empire and the consolidation of the idea of the nation-state. Both artists’ practice – which includes film, sculpture and installation – is centred on a confrontation with the past; through a multi-disciplinary approach they weave memories, reflections and storytelling in order to demonstrate how the personal and the historical converge and intersect.

In their work, both Hera Büyüktaşcıyan and Maria Tsagkari, bring to the fore issues of absence, invisibility, as well as marginalised, suppressed or forgotten narratives in order to anchor memory through unseen and obscured aspects of time, space as well as cultural memory as they all relate to ruptures in socio-political histories.

Excavating and unearthing unexpected narratives, occurrences and momentous events the artists highlight the entanglements between geographies of proximity and point to the material and psychological memory of unstable or contested spaces and territories. Their work explores the way longing or trauma manifests itself through objects and activates mechanisms of memory, by calling forth experiences of war, displacement, exodus and migration and the parallel histories that emerge because of them.

Hera Büyüktaşcıyan was born in Istanbul and comes from a multicultural background with Greek, Armenian and Turkish roots. In her multidisciplinary practice, Büyüktaşcıyan looks back on tumultuous histories rooted in territorial disputes, displaced populations, and ruptures often centering on the history of the broader geopolitical region of the former Ottoman Empire. In her sculptural installations, in-situ interventions, drawings, and films one often encounters archival or architectural elements that bear within them traces of extinction in order to revoke memory and allow the past to be rewritten.

Maria Tsagkari was born in Piraeus, Greece with family ties to Asia Minor and Samos. Drawing inspiration from personal and collective archives, historical sources, literary and cinematic references, Tsagkari attempts to retrieve silenced stories that challenge monolithic historical narratives and representation. In this context, themes such as displacement, loss, faith, dream and love are being incorporated, often revealing an internal struggle between impulse and social, political and historical ties.

Following a residency in Samos, both artists will create new works for the exhibition which will be shown alongside existing works.

*The exhibition borrows its title from Maria Tsagkari’s work with the same title, which makes reference to theGreek myth of Icarus, who fell into the sea and drowned after flying too close to the sun on wings made of wax after defying his father’s advice. The exhibition interprets the myth of Icarus in metaphorical terms. i.e. that the recklessness and defiance of limitations could be in a sense applied to the Eastern Mediterranean region’s history and present.