The multilayered city of Istanbul is our site. It is a city linked by water, people, patterns, cats, birds, and, as with all cites, the presence of death.
Time leaves its imprint on a city and in our memories. The past is lodged in the present and the future is in the past. Temporal experience can be a kind of wormhole; in cities change is always evident. Istanbul is in the process of irreversible change as more and more people pass through the city leaving the residue of their presence.
Memory Holes takes Hi8 video footage shot in 1994 at ordinary sites around Istanbul and explores seven moments that travel from the past to the present—and back again.
Projected through site-inspired icons specific to each location, this original early video footage now floats through our phones in augmented reality, into the site today—and hovers there. Might these dematerialized artifacts be possible echoes of future fossils?
—Lynn Marie Kirby and Merve Caskurlu Belgesay, with design by Baris Belgesay, mobile app by Yasha Jain
www. memoryholes.space
Lynn Marie Kirby is a San Francisco based artist who works in a variety of time-based situations, from film to public interventions and performance. Her projects map emotional topographies through time and history. Her most recent work uses scent, taste, and touch to explore expanded embodied perception beyond the visual and aural, to engage the public in the history of particular sites.
In the last ten years, Kirby has increasingly planned her own site interventions, outside established art systems, to expand the idea of an exhibition and its relation to the public. Kirby will present an overview of recent work, including interventions in the Venice Biennale, in 2017 and 2019, followed by a presentation with Merve Caskurlu Belgesay, of their collaboration “Memory Holes” taking place now in Istanbul—an intervention into the current Biennale.
Lynn Marie Kirby: With a background in cinema and conceptual performance, Kirby works with shifting recording technologies, creating film/video hybrids, site interventions and mappings that become records of time, technologies and places. Her improvisational and collaborative projects manifest at the intersection of events and archives, looking at the links between public and private, biographical and historical systems. She has recently collaborated with Etel Adnan, Xiaofei Li, Alexis Petty and Lisa Robertson.
Kirby's work has been widely exhibited in galleries and museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Olympic Museum, Sarajevo; the Pompidou Centre in Paris; Arsenal in Berlin; Manage in St. Petersburg; Portland Museum of Art; the Kennedy Center and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington DC; LACE and MOCA in Los Angeles, the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley; the Oakland Museum of California in Oakland; the San Francisco Cinematheque, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the de Young Museum, the Museum of Modern Art and Triple Base Gallery in San Francisco.
Merve Caskurlu Belgesay: She has worked in the fields of art, technology and film since 2013. One of the various events she co-directed is the first new media art festival in Turkey, titled “amber’15 Art and Technology Festival”. She continues her Ph.D. project on the impact of DIY culture in filmmaking. She is a Fulbright Visiting Researcher who is currently based in the San Francisco Bay Area and Istanbul.