Crowd Fade Crowd Fade

In our age of political and economic turbulence, it often feels as if the world around us is crumbling. Yet how do such collective narratives of progress or destruction relate to subjective, personal experiences, and how do we distinguish between them?

Latifa Echakhch’s works comment upon belonging and progress, democracy and rebellion. For the Istanbul Biennial, she has produced a new installation titled Crowd Fade, comprising two large frescos on opposite walls in Istanbul Modern. Each painting depicts an image of crowds in Istanbul’s Taksim Square, a site for both celebrations and public demonstrations, such as the Gezi Park protests in 2013, when people expressed their outcry against the government’s decision to erase a public space in the name of urban development. The surface of the frescoes are severely chipped; pieces of paint have fallen onto the ground, as though the architecture itself is crumbling.

Echakhch’s installation examines notions of entropy, chance and decay, and more specifically the deterioration of ideals such as democracy, protest and political progress, which have recently succumbed to perfidious forces worldwide. Painted directly onto the two walls, with a lack of any sense that there is a ‘beyond’ or ‘behind’, the work conveys a feeling of being caught between the past and the future, calling attention to our projections onto built environments and our inability to see past what we know to be illusory. The crumbling paint speaks to widespread feelings of the shattering of illusions, to loss, insecurity and instability, as well as the corruption and breakdown of any shared vision of a democratic future.