Fishbone IV

… a shriek remains nailed in the dark corridor like a big fishbone in the throat of an unknown guest ...'—Yannis Ritsos, The Dead House, 1959

This work draws on Hera Büyüktaşcıyan’s interest in deconstructing silence and invisibility connected to language, space and time as a way of reading history and collective traumas. As the artist writes: 'A fishbone that is nailed in the dark corridors of the mind … could be a piece of land … a particle of history … a fragment of a language, or a remnant that refuses to come out, staying put as a petrified shriek deep within.'

Fishbone VI explores the delicate relationship between sound and silence: a liminal space that conjures up the unspoken and subconscious elements concealed in the depths of memory. Suspended in the void in various frequencies, the fossil-like sculptures allude to what lies dormant or is silenced through contested histories. They stand as resurrected fragments of time in a cyclic composition, awakening one another with gentle touches or hard nudges. Through their movement these edgy, heavy forms turn into living organisms that act as reminders of sunken and unspoken reveries and histories, urging us to activate and emancipate the petrified particles that block the flow of our inner voices.