As part of the exhibition In Real Time, we invite you to join us for Entrusted Ground, a performance that is conceived as part of Gözde İlkin’s installation of the same name.
 

The 40-minute dance performance is a collaboration between artist Gözde İlkin, choreographer Aslı Öztürk, musician Berke Can Özcan, and NYUAD Art Gallery’s curator Duygu Demir. It features dancers Barış Diker, Alara Erdem and Umut Özdaloğlu. 
 

Demir writes:

Gözde İlkin’s Entrusted Ground installation can be seen as a motif to be inhabited, or perhaps, it is merely a cave in the crevices of our minds. It is conceived as a home to homeless stones, a shift for dancers and twigs, a prayer for fractures, or a dream enveloped in echoes that come from the four corners of the world. On the one hand, the installation is a landscape painting stretched to three dimensions, on the other, it is a stage for sound and movement.

The performance, like the installation, revolves around the four elements of fire, air, earth, and water that comprise the Universe, according to ancient Greek philosophers. In the performance, these elements are embodied by the dancers, tracing an abstract journey of transformation from dust to the human, and beyond. Öztürk’s choreography, informed by somatic bodywork, both takes cues from the imagery on İlkin’s two-dimensional textile works, carrying them into the three-dimensional space, and activates the artist’s soft sculptures with movement to create moving landscapes. The music is composed and performed by Berke Can Özcan; he combines the soundscape of the field recordings he created for the Entrusted Ground installation with sections from his previous album, Mountains are Mountains. Originally, the Entrusted Ground performance was developed simultaneously with Gözde İlkin’s solo exhibition of the same title in the summer of 2022 in Istanbul for artSümer.