Keeping Time

Online Exhibition: Keeping Time
With: Fatma Çiftçi & Aikaterini Gegisian
Date: 20^th November – 13^th December 2020

Corridor Project Space responding to the Covid-19 pandemic restrictions, continues its 2020 Frozen Time program online, with Keeping Time by Fatma Çiftçi and Aikaterini Gegisian. The artists reframe the exhibition as an online dialogue, taking over Corridor Project Space’s Instagram account and publishing weekly images, texts and video links. 

Keeping Time questions how time is recorded and narrated, from a multiplicity of perspectives, in personal experiences, via oral histories or from the point of view of official repositories.  In the online exhibition dialogue set up by the two artists, time is “kept’ by autobiographical moments, in memories, drawings and sounds or though reimagining audio-visual archives. 

In the ongoing series In a Moment of Abstraction (Bir Dalgınlık Ağnında) (2020) Çiftçi asks other artists and the general public to reimagine autobiographical moments by drawing and by recording voice-overs of her stories. The layering of these second-hand accounts of Çiftçi experiences turns her anecdotes into a kaleidoscope of experiences, a process that complicates both the witnessing and the recording of the time passing.  

In the last episode of the multi-layered archival work Third Person (Plural) (2019-2020) Gegisian assembles shots of people, from close-ups to raving crowds, that populate the 200 archival films that the entire project is based upon. Culminating as the crescendo of a series of episodes charting the post-war history of Europe, the faces in Third Person (Plural) become the witnesses of ‘their time’ passing. 

If A Voyager! (Eğer bir yolcu!) is based on a recording of Çiftçi’s journey from Baku to Tehran in 2009. Returning to the material after a long period of time, the resulting work moves from a travel documentary of other cultures, customs and traditions to become a repository of Çiftçi’s lifetime experiences.

At a moment when coronavirus pandemic has dramatically changed our everyday movements and experience of time, the two artists ask how do you leave time behind?