NOW AND HERE

Bilsart is hosting Ateş Alpar’s performance “Now and Here” by providing space support.

Ateş Alpar’s new performance Now and Here, which explores the processes of encounters, endurance, continuity, and disruption, will take place at Bilsart. Alpar will experience the constructive and destructive cycles of movement, sound, writing, and image, focusing on the transformation of the body and the possibilities in between.

Musician Gazele, poet Mehmet Said Aydın, and artist Sevinç Altan will join Alpar in this performance.

Alpar’s Now and Here opens the door to contingency and collective practices. The artist interprets the body’s deviation from balance as a step that strengthens resilience, starting with the question, “Can movement detach the body from the place it calls home?” The performance seeks an answer to the question “Is it necessary and possible to stay balanced?” in the traces of disruptions in the flow of history.

Now and Here

The future possibilities leaking through the cracks in the historical layers formed by sound, image, and writing connect bodies through encounters. Encounters shape and break the body, expand and redefine its limits. As the body in formation clings to space and time, it sways between being and invisibility. Movement and gesture shake momentary balance and open doors to new possibilities. The body’s deviation from balance signals the next step that will enhance resilience, just like the flowing of words, the contingency of noise, and the random arrangement of images.

This performance enters a world of intersectionality where the blurriness of images, the fragmentation of words, and the cracks in the resonance of sounds collide. Sound shakes the image, the image shakes the movement, and the movement shakes the writing, and all balances are disrupted and reconstructed, again and again. Ateş Alpar

Performance Details:
Ateş Alpar
Now and Here
Performance
January 4, 2025 | 18:00-18:30

Click here for the press kit.

ABOUT ATEŞ ALPAR

Ateş Alpar (1988, Nusaybin / Mardin)
Ateş Alpar, who conveys the images to the viewer in a detailed and meticulous way with real and metaphorical meaning, works with various media including video, performance, sound, photography, and site-specific installations. Focusing on issues such as border, security tools, cultural destruction/colonial politics and identity fluidity; the ambiguity of history and the concept of memory are at the centre of the artistic productions of Alpar. His work consists of long-term projects which span over years; spreading the themes he dwells on over time, Alpar conveys his observations by filtering his experiences from the paths he traveled in different periods. Incorporating collective thinking practices into the production process, the artist publicises their experiences and encourages dialogue. The elaborative approach that divides and reassembles history is aimed at building a bridge between the past, present and future; it allows the viewer to track the zig-zag traces of the processes of social and cultural change and lays the groundwork for the construction of counter- memory and counter-archive. Alpar currently lives and works in Istanbul.