SAHA supports Contour Biennale 11 within the scope of Özgür Kar’s project. Curated by Sofia Lemos, the biennial takes place from 5 September to 1 November 2026 under the title The Eyes of the Heart and the Soul of the World.
Delving into the invisible frequencies of personal and planetary becoming, Contour Biennale 11 engages the visions, dreams, and projections that arise through life’s ongoing transformations: from gestation and birth to childhood and adolescence; from gender transition and ageing to love and loss; from climate crisis and exile to regeneration and return—as images that both move us and mobilise change.
Kar’s work, intitled HEAVY GROUND depicts a romantic, operatic encounter between two flies caught on a glue trap. The flies serenade each other before entering a tender final union, surrounded by dead flies trapped in the same sticky landscape. Flies are a recurring motif in Kar’s work, recalling the musca depicta, a motif within the ancient memento mori tradition of meditation on mortality and decay. Here, Kar confronts the visceral repulsion flies typically provoke by finding their relationship worthy of affection, song, and lament.
Created in collaboration with musician Arnljótur Sigurðsson, the duet draws on an iconic recording by Clara Rockmore—the celebrated theremin virtuoso of the early twentieth century—of Manuel de Falla’s 1915 Andalusian gypsy ballet, El amor brujo [Love, the Magician], connecting disparate emotional and cultural registers across time.
Özgür Kar (1992, Ankara) is an artist living and working in Amsterdam. He creates sculptural video installations and sound-driven exhibitions that operate between moving image, theatre, and spatial staging. Kar’s practice unfolds at the intersection of sound, sculpture, animation, and installation. Drawing on folklore, experimental theatre, early animation, shadow-play traditions, and television culture, Kar develops non-linear theatrical scenes in which desire, mortality, boredom, and longing recur as conditions that are at once intimate, absurd, and otherworldly.
About Contour Biennale
Since its founding in 2003, Contour Biennale has carved out a singular space in the landscape of moving image and time-based media, engaging with the shifting contours of artistic practice with each edition. Over ten iterations, it has evolved into an internationally widely acclaimed biennale—one that resists fixity, continuously reimagining itself to resonate with both local rhythms and international currents.
