The Presence of Absence, or the Catastrophe Theory

On May 19, 2016, IZOLYATSIA presents the exhibition “The Presence of Absence, or the Catastrophe Theory”, curated by Cathryn Drake. Three artists from Albania, Greece, and Turkey will present sixteen videos and two photo series accompanied with a site-specic installation created by Petros Efstathiadis.

Artists Leonard Qylafi, Petros Efstathiadis, and Ali Kazma come from modern states formerly united by the Ottoman Empire that have since taken vastly different directions guided by the vagaries of realpolitik and ethnic strife. Straddling the diverse regions of Europe, the Balkans, and the Middle East, these countries refl ect the enduring threads and ruptures that transcend the artificial constructs of political entities—a reality exemplifoed by the current European crisis and ongoing turmoil in the Middle East and Ukraine.

This show elucidates the circumstances of IZOLYATSIA as well as Ukraine, whose historical map is a complex mosaic involving Ottoman rule and an original Greek population still comprising more than 200,000. Established in a former insulation materials factory in Donetsk by industrialist Luba Michailova, whose father managed it under Communism, IZOLYATSIA was seized and occupied in 2014 by armed separatists in the name of the self-proclaimed “People’s Republic of Donetsk” and forced into exile in Kyiv, along with many other Donbas refugees. Artworks were destroyed as perversions, a cultural tactic employed by regimes to reinforce a desired identity by obliterating undesirable associations.

The alchemy of place is a potent mixture of history and conquest, cultural memory and mythology, politics and national identity, landscape and geography, with the narratives of victors inscribed onto any topography in the form of physical and ephemeral remains. Foreign elements enter a territory and stay for a time, leaving a residue that becomes an integral part of its culture, the origins of this or that subject to collective amnesia and finally indistinct. Absence is also present in the people torn from their homes, as evoked by Mahmoud Darwish’s poetic meditation In the Presence of Absence.

The tragic trajectory of the Syrian refugee crisis is merely the latest in a long history of mass migrations spurred by war and conflict. Displacement stirs nostalgia, and the flow of language and culture is a river that cannot be halted. Our tumultuous past is an omnipresent beast whose traces creep up through the cracks of collective unconscious, often emerging in the form of extremism. Thus these artists turn our gaze to the things that become part of our identity, the things we take with us wherever we go, and the things that return to their origins like moths to the light.