SNF ARTWORKS Curatorial Fellow Ioanna Gerakidi, writer, curatoror and educator travelled to Istanbul for a 6-week curatorial residency program at SAHA Association (May-July 2023), where she will get the chance to further develop her research and practice.
During her residency, Ioanna conducted research around the subjects of companionship, kinship, witness and solidarity for writing a lexicon of psalms and spells, of idiolects and neologisms, spoken by the ones whose voices haven’t yet been heard. Through engaging diverse communities, her research longs for inventing, transcribing or legitimizing a language of trauma, suffering, catastrophe, political and personal turmoil.
Learn more about SAHA Association here.
Ioanna’s residency is supported by ARTWORKS through its founding donor the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF).
In June 9th, 2023 Ioanna Gerakidi in residence at SAHA Association, organised and moderated a workshop entitled “A pile of stones, painfully assembled”
A pile of stones, painfully assembled
A workshop by Ioanna Gerakidi @Saha Studios
Borrowing its title from Adrienne Rich’s poem A Mark of Resistance, the workshop “A pile of stones, painfully assembled”, aimed to think through various methodologies of “unlearning imperialism” quoting the words of Ariella Azoulay, embodied in personal, professional, sociopolitical, and institutional decisions, whilst focusing on multifaceted forms of violence. By tracing from the violence of the archive that anti-colonial, linguistic and queer theories are trying to unveil, to slow violence, a term coined by Rob Nixon when referring to the ‘violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all’, the seminar spoke about alternative currents and imaginaries and their possible application in research, curatorial and artistic forms.
How can we subvert the dominant histories by thinking across the resonances between studies of otherness, disorder or disease and discourses of diaspora or occupation, among others, as ways to form other sociabilities, public frameworks, exhibitional or artistic formats?
The seminar will consist of collective reading and analyses on the proposed material and of a series of exercises varying from writing to other ways of embodying theory and through alternative knowledge production systems.
Ioanna Gerakidi wrote about her experience of her 6-week stay in Istanbul as part of SAHA’s Curatorial Program in ARTWORKS Medium platform. Read her essay “Surface(d) above the face, or what escapes our love and attention” here or follow our medium channel at artworksfellows.medium.com