Evrim Kavcar

Graduated from the sculpture department of Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Evrim Kavcar received her MFA from San Francisco Art Institute on a Fulbright scholarship, and PhD from Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University. She studied Foto-Film and animation at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her practice makes use of tracings, moulds and casts, as well as interviews, visual and sound recordings while studying selected situations/moments to explore layers of memory and forms of relating. Taking off from the contradictions between facts and remembrances, her work arrives at a half-documentary approach where the gap between fact and fiction reveals what may have been overlooked. She was the recipient of an Istanbul – Berlin stipendium at nGbk Berlin for six months in 2018.  Since 2018 she has been collaborating with Elif Öner in Sensitive Sounds, an open-ended artwork that traces the subjective, social and cultural layers of sound through multiple forms. As an artist academician, she has been teaching at the Faculty of Fine Arts at Mardin Artuklu University since 2013. 

A Voluntary Movement

Everything can fly. In fact, it’s more than a possibility since everything already flies. The narrator knows this because we can blink, which means we’re flying. The wind fills our armpits, which means we’re flying. The narrator knows this: everything takes off. During take-off, there are stopovers, and one of the stopovers is treetops. Treetops are scenic places where one can perch on the tips of leaves. Since one can perch on leaf tips, one must break into many pieces to do so, which means one can fragment. Think of the weight of an eye, a hand, a neck or a head. A head would surely fall off, as even an eyeball would be too heavy. The same is true for a liver; think of all that mass. Mass divided by volume. Because we know the laws of physics, we know that there’s no way a liver can levitate; it would fall; we know that much. Basic gravity. So, that liver must have turned into something lighter, something that could fly. But, into what? ... This act of levitation is definitely conscious, it’s not just mindlessly adrift. Just when you’re about to feel great and find yourself thinking, “Wow, this is awesome, I’m gliding through all the gaps and passing through all the holes”, and then you see the manhole covers, and you think about bullet holes. That thought gives you a pause.

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In her video titled A Voluntary Movement, Evrim Kavcar creates a narrative that relates objects, animals, plants, people and various things from different times and geographies through flying. This narrative was triggered by Kavcar’s desire to make a stop-motion animation at SAHA Studio. The animation, which proceeds physically and tactilely, is interrupted by a mandatory relocation. A stubborn image takes advantage of this interruption, appearing in front of the narrative: A dead housefly stuck to the table by its wing. The notes and drawings accumulated in notebooks between locations come to life around a dead housefly, a body that has a different temporality and is highly manoeuvrable when alive.


Translation: Evren Erlevent