Bilge Dursun

AMNESIA

Ausstellung

Juni 2025

 

“Are you going to sit there just like nothing happened? Just like nothing happened? Nothing happened. Nothing. What happened? Nothing ” is what I see when I look at people’s eyes. Though we were standing next to each other, banners in our hands, slogans on our lips, when something was happening. When that something was happening, it was happening to me, to her, to him, to them, to all of us. Now we all have amnesia. As if nothing had happened. Memory falls too short to recall what I was wearing on that day in March when we heard the news. What news? We don’t remember anymore. ‘If you forgot it’s a lie,’ they said. The country we were born in, the streets we marched on, the fire that burned the green body of the Mediterranean, the shaking ground that swallowed the South East, and the cities that swallowed us, we forgot. Then was it all a lie?”

 

amnesia is a research on the aftermath of a society experiencing memory loss. The research mainly focuses on the socio-political climate of hybrid-regimes. It is an observation of how rapidly society consumes the collective political memory under psychosis. Using the theme of exposure, light was considered as the main power figure, controlling the degree of visibility of details, in this case, the memory.

Bilge Dursun, a Turkish interdisciplinary artist with a background in urban design, explores the intersection of body, space, memory, culture, and politics. Her current focus in performative research leans toward the in-between state in relation to urban voids and the theme of exposure in connection with the politics.

 

Somewhere in the Nordbahnhof:

Three weeks I spent in a room made of metal, wood, and spider webs. It was a void inside a void; a void recursion. You could understand it from the way the doors slide, the warnings around the room, and the unusual ways the windows open, that the memory of the space is impossible to forget. As I eat my porridge on this passenger seat, I think of every dent on this cushion. Maybe it’s from cigarettes from the times when smoking was still allowed on public trains. The green acrylic next to it? It must be recent. I am not sure what I’ll leave of myself. I stand up and walk towards the door. I see all these warnings in German about not getting off the train before it stops. I open the door and look around. I look around to see all the other voids sitting on old, rusty rails; all in different colours and styles. Then I am awakened by the sound of the S-Bahn. It’s tripping my brain, hearing moving trains while you stand by a dead one. I go back inside and lock the doors with this square key that is the ultimate reminder of where I am. I snuggle into my bed. After counting if all the spiders are where they were in the morning, I can go to sleep, only to be woken up by the sound of the trains that are not yet a void. 

 

 

Photocredits: Bilge Dursun, Luciano Mazzo, Clarissa Kassai