My new video installation, Screen Recording 2020-11-20 at 1.59.44 PM, will be on view at The Gallatin Galleries (1 Washington Pl. @ Broadway) through June 14th.
Screen Recording 2020-11-20 at 1.59.44 PM is a video and installation work about the fast-changing landscapes of memory in displacement. It comprises a 9-minute video featuring footage of my mother’s hometown—the so-called ‘ghost town’ of Varosi, which was cordoned off by the Turkish military for close to 50 years—in 2020; and a newspaper print of my mother’s childhood diary, recovered from her home’s ruins decades after she was displaced.
Huge thanks to Keti Papadema, Marcos Papaleontiou, Marios Stylianou, Pavlos Kyriakou, Loukia Hadjiyianni, Kika Ioannidou, Neoclis Nicolaou, Clio Hadjigeorgiou, Silvio Augusto Rusmigo, Keith Miller and Ellada Evangelou.
Artist Statement - Screen Recording 2020-11-20 at 1.59.44 PM
The town of Varosi, or Varosha, on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, was fenced off by the Turkish military for 46 years. Since the Greek-backed coup d’etat and Turkish invasion of 1974 that divided Cyprus into a Greek Cypriot-controlled south and Turkish Cypriot-controlled north, Varosi was neither settled nor demolished. The erstwhile bustling seaside town, replete with modernist architecture and miles of sandy beaches, was left to the elements, slowly turning into a shell of itself, earning the name of “ghost town.”
In 2006, a Turkish Cypriot friend of the artist’s maternal uncle entered the town undetected, and recovered an old exercise book from the family’s ancestral home. It was a diary of the artist’s mother, from the time she was eight years old, featuring colored pencil drawings with each entry. The diary was the closest the artist ever came to witnessing what her mother’s life was like before the war. When the Turkish military opened Varosi to the public in October 2020—in a move denounced by the UN and the international community as illegal—the artist and her mother visited the town together for the first time. A few weeks later, the artist returned to her home in New York.
