Balcony for the Self IV

Hera Büyüktaşçıyan’s artistic production, which consists of installations, sculptures and drawings, reflects on the meaning of being ‘invisible’ through questions about memory, identity, space and time. Her creations mostly involve site-specific and contextual installations, revealing a memory, an image or a story that has remained in the dark until then. These works, which explore the permeability between remembering and forgetting, the visible and the invisible, the present and the past, as well as the slippery nature of these concepts, call our attention to collective and personal memories related to urban spaces.

The series titled "Balcony for the Self" was created while Hera Büyüktaşçıyan participated in the artist residency programme at Villa Waldberta in Munich between 2012–2013. During this period, she contemplated balconies as instruments for vision in her imagined journeys. Both part of the house and the public space, and a place where one can concurrently be inside and outside, the balcony intrigued the artist in its ability to allow one to view the city from a safe distance and with a wide-angled perspective, while at the same time exposing the person standing on it to the gaze of the street and the people outside. Büyüktaşçıyan associates the interaction between inside and outside realms with the dynamic processes of forgetting and remembering occurring within memory which she views as a mental space. In her series "Balcony for the Self", the artist presents fragile yet self-reliant mobile balconies which are detached and isolated from all the other structural elements of a building. The series distinguishes the balcony as an architectural element and a transitional space that bridges various dichotomies such as city and subject, public and private, and seeing and being seen, encouraging viewers to reconsider these definitions.