Exhibition, Şafak Şule Kemancı "lean on me the earth tree"

Şafak Şule Kemancı's solo exhibition "lean on me, the earth tree" will meet the audience at Ka on November 5th.

In this exhibition focused on Arkadaş Z. Özger, memory, historicity, compassion, mourning, and desire, Şafak Şule Kemancı, one of the guest artists of Ankara Queer Art Program, intervenes to queer expropriated biographies and histories. She calls for a process of collective healing through radical compassion and reorganization of the past.

"In Ankara, where Arkadaş Z. Özger was drawn apart from the stars, in the world of the nettles surrounding him, of the thorny "solidities", of the rattle devils playing their tambourines while reproducing the macro and micro norms of masculinity in flesh and bone, and taking his silence as their ground, of the worms whose rings infinitely multiply as they keep speaking, in the world of the "normal" that lets hope die on the vine, Şafak Şule Kemancı is looking for the spell that will bring Arkadaş back to us in the darkness of starless skies to let burgundy flowers and thorns turn green and blue with love and friendship and with queer comradeship and desire. She invites us into the desiring burgundy forest where the two meet and to see the starry earth tree.

Under the tree, there are events waiting to be returned, our losses who desire life: the ones who still embrace and share the sky when their hearts are punctured, being tested by the weight of other bodies, caressing all the species, smelling and kissing the whole in the world of the living beings; when the most beautiful flowers turn into greens, reds and purples and smile with all their grace … they are waiting to be unearthed together and upon the call of Şafak Şule Kamancı, and through queer compassion.”