• 
• Hera Buyuktascian (Turkey)
  installation (objects, photo prints on plastic surface)

  Department of Fine Arts, Armenian Open University (Project Space)
  April 23-31, 2011

The project ‘Worthy Hearts’ aims to question the notion of being part of a community, the relation between self, space, and communities, as well as the conflicts and tension the word ‘community’ creates: either solitude or a sense of warm belonging. To be part of a community implies a kind of belonging that is more wished for than actually achieved, a feeling of connectedness that is more dreamed of than materially attained. And it is this wishing and wanting that makes community something that matters to almost all of us. ‘Community’ has come to be a keyword of contemporary life, not because we all live in one but because most of us do not: it is the lack of it that makes it valued, it is the loss of it that makes it desired, it is the envisioning of it that makes it real. The intriguing thing about community is the way the same term brings people together and, almost always, tears them apart. It is both a point of convergence and a point of contention and also the opposite way: it is a point of tension which lets people escape from it. It is on this level that the notion of ‘otherness’ comes into scene.

Bringing together diverse points of entry into an ambiguous idea that pervades contemporary culture, ‘Worthy Hearts’ questions and offers a glimpse into the multi-faced dimensions of what community and its expansions can be.

Hera Buyuktascian is an Armenian-Greek rooted artist living and working in Istanbul who mainly emphasizes the concept of the Other and cultural identity, which, as her interest, includes many branches in itself, such as cultural identity, belonging, xenophobia, socio-cultural and self-memory. Her works incorporate a wide range of media and manifests into objects, installations, and photography. By taking items of everyday use and removing them from their everyday cultural context, she sets them up into a new narrative context, using metaphors from history, mythology, iconographic elements, quotes, and epigrams. She composes an imaginary connection between aspects of space and time, of geography and history and opens a new discursive scope.