Keeping Time

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

Aikaterini Gegisian ©, Third Person (Plural), 2017-2019. Installation and film in 8 episodes. Episode 5: The Girls are Marching, 12 mins 41 secs, b&w, stereo sound, Video Still.

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?

Fatma Çiftçi ©, If A Voyager!, 2020. Video, 5 mins 15 secs, colour, stereo sound, Video Still

Online Timeline:
– 20th of November 2020
Fatma Çiftçi, In a Moment of Abstraction (Bir Dalgınlık Ağnında) 2020 (first part)
– 24th of November 2020
Fatma Çiftçi, In a Moment of Abstraction (Bir Dalgınlık Ağnında) 2020 (second part)
– 27th of November 2020
Aikaterini Gegisian, Third Person (Plural) (2019)
– 1st of December 2020
Fatma Çiftçi, In a Moment of Abstraction (Bir Dalgınlık Ağnında) 2020 (third part)
– 2nd of December 2020
Fatma Çiftçi, If A Voyager! (Eğer bir yolcu!) 2020
– 4th of December 2020
Aikaterini Gegisian, Third Person (Plural) (2019)
– 8th of December 2020
Fatma Çiftçi and Aikaterini Gegisian Podcast about the exhibition concept and production process in the pandemic period.

Fatma Çiftçi work is supported by SAHA Association. Corridor Project Space is supported by Gemeente Amsterdam.