Inspired from Hayırsızada, an island in the Sea of Marmara, which bears the shadow of a past where 80,000 dogs were exiled and slaughtered in the early 20th century, İnci Eviner’ video work Neural Crest of an Island explores the fragile and transient nature of existence through a complex world of historical images, plants, and becoming-animal. In the video, the artist superimposes the island’s multiple cartographies, tracing the unexpected encounters created by these overlaps. She combines various scenarios to uncover what lies beneath the barren island, where complex interactions are acted out and entangled in a sensory and emotional web, fusing the social and the psychic.
Neural Crest of an Island offers a psychic choreography of the processes of subjectification in individual scenarios expressed on a stage where culturally coded images, concepts, discourses, and modes of representation are piled upon one another. Squirming minarets of the 18th-century Orientalist engravings by Antoine Ignace Melling, identifications or distinctions between a yellow wig extending from a minaret and the tails of a pair of grey horses, a man with an axe accompanying Antigone’s rhythm, and a puppet struggling with his puppeteer: all those figures emerging from an awry fantasy world are all engaged in an endless effort to decipher the codes of power.
Extracted from Dirimart’s website
Performers: Melih Kıraç, Eren Sağın, Sırma Öztaş
Post-production: Abdulkadir Özer
Costume design: Fulya Halilcikoğlu
Assistant: Eren Sağın
Production: Hokus Film
Producer: Tunahan Emre Bilgin
Sound Design: Alper Maral
DOP: Utku Öztürk
Grip Team: Anatolian Grip
Light Crew: Phoenix Lighting
Acknowledgement
S.Buse Yıldırım & Beykoz Kundura Team Volkan Narcı, Head of Marine Life Conservation Society
Kaya Didman