Hera Büyüktaşcıyan

Biennale of Sydney | Australia

SAHA provides support for the new project of Hera Büyüktaşçıyan, who was invited to the 23rd Sydney Biennial, held between 12 March - 13 June 2022. Curated by José Roca, the biennial titled "rīvus" articulates around conceptual wetlands around the waterways along Gadigal, Burramatagal and Cabrogal. Büyüktaşcıyan installs a site-specific kinetic sculpture entitled Fish Bone VI at Pier 2/3 in Walsh Bay.

Rivers, wetlands and other salt and freshwater ecosystems feature in the 23rd Biennale of Sydney (2022), titled rīvus, as dynamic living systems with varying degrees of political agency. The 23rd Biennale of Sydney, titled rīvus, meaning “stream” in Latin, will feature new work and commissions responding to water ecology and relationships with the natural world. rīvus invites several aqueous beings into a dialogue with artists, architects, designers, scientists, and communities, entangling multiple voices and other modes of communication to ask unlikely questions.

The 2022 edition has been developed and realised by a Curatorium comprised of Artistic Director and Colombian curator José Roca and co-curators Paschal Daantos Berry, Anna Davis, Hannah Donnelly and Talia Linz.

About Hera Büyüktaşçıyan

In her multidisciplinary practice, Hera Büyüktaşcıyan uses the notion of absence and invisibility to anchor memory, space and time through unseen and forgotten aspects of history. As a storyteller, she integrates metaphors from local myths with historic and iconographic elements of different geographies to open up new narratives. Water is a recurring theme in her practice, referring to what the artist understands as the fluid, aquatic nature of memory. Through her site-specific interventions, sculptures, drawings and films, Büyüktaşcıyan dives into terrestrial imagination by unearthing patterns of selected narratives and timelines that unfold the material memory of unstable spaces.