Academic, artistic and cultural :: Constructive imaginings of the discordant . Making heritage of urban movements . Hajde
The Garden of (not) Forgetting :: Reflection . Nevşünema . Memory of a place, topography of destruction . Many places on the trail of a place . Mehpare's herbarium . Whispers' garden .
Last year's herbarium . Last year's catalogue . The pool . Seeds from the Earth . Remembering exercises . A sequence from a garden; whispers, seeds, traces
Spatial design :: Winter Garden . Visiting Scholars and Guest Artist Offices . Reading Room . Imaginable Guidelines
Plankton Project :: durak Ovacık . gölge Seferihisar
Visual design :: The Garden of (not) Forgetting . Hajde . Aidiyet [production] . Aidiyet [visual]
Study experience :: Sound Topography . Observers' Route . Loafer Cinema . All that is Solid . Summer Homes: Claiming the Coast.
MEHPARE'S HERBARIUM
type artistic research, installation
role researcher, artist and curator
team with Eda Aslan
produced as part of The Garden of (not) Forgetting project
presented at
DEPO, İstanbul, 2021
The basements in two countries, twenty boxes filled with plants preserved between papers which were collected from Ida Mountains in the 1940s by Mehpare Heilbronn. Like the scientist who was forgotten in her nineteen room house, pieces of herbarium were hanged in limbo in these basements.
The story of the plants assembled in Mehpare's herbarium was rooted in Ida Mountains in Turkey. Preserved plants accompanied Mehpare Heilbronn's ride to Germany in 1959. She was a woman scientist fleeing from Turkey’s military politics and taking her herbarium in twenty boxes with her to be able to cope with her exile. Years after her death, eighteen boxes of herbarium files were returned to the Botanical Garden’s Herbarium in Istanbul in 2010 by her son. However, two boxes were forgotten in a basement in Frankfurt. When we found these boxes in 2018, the herbarium in Istanbul was closed due to government authorities' decision. The two boxes were carried from Frankfurt years later and presented to the public in the exhibition space while the eighteen boxes were prisoned in a basement in Istanbul.
Mehpare’s herbarium highlights this unprecedented situation, the unseen work of a woman scientist and the robust process of collecting and finding archival material. A performance accompanied the installation to present plants, and video records of the performance were part of the installation.
Image 1
image 2
image
