Here as Center of the World- Dutch Art Institute Workshop in Diyarbakir.

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Workshop leaders: Erkan Özgen (Diyarbakir), Libia Castro (Esp), Ólafur Ólafsson (Iceland)

Project Co-curator: Lucy Cotter (Ireland), Project manager: Rik Fernhout (NL)

Ev dEr wEkî navEnda cîhanê / Here as the Centre of the World

Project Presentation: 22 marcH 18:00Diyarbakir Sanat Merkezi

Location: Diyarbakir Arts Centre, Diyar Galeria no: 9, DaGkapi/Diyarbakir

Participants: askin aDan (Diyarbakir)

MizGin Deniz (Diyarbakir),

baris seyitvan (Diyarbakir),

seçkin ayDin (Diyarbakir),

sCott ponik (usa),

Chris MeiGhan (uk),

MaChtelD aarDse (nl),

kaMila szejnoCh (pl),

astriD van peet (nl),

Mei-yu tao (taipei),

anne korteweG (nl),

bani bannwart (Ch),

bassel al saaDy (syria),

liu, pei-wen (taipei),

oMiMa hasab el rasuol (suDan).

Here as the Centre of the World: Dyabakir

In recent years, the Dutch Art Institute has responded to its own, relatively isolated, position in Enschede in the far east of The Netherlands by developing an international cultural network with organizations and artists that some will consider to be peripheral and thus less than obvious. These energetic, inquisitive and ( despite their sometimes complicated conditions for art production) highly enterprising partners are the backbone of Here as the Centre of the World, which is the outcome of a shared vision of productive creative exchange.
Here as the Centre of the World is a transnational artistic research project for young artists from Taipei (Taiwan), Damascus (Syria), Beirut (Lebanon), Khartoum (Sudan), Diyarbakir (Turkey)and Enschede (The Netherlands). It was launched in the spring of 2006 and consists of 6 workshops, a conference and the publication of a book. Finallyaround 70 artists will have been involved in the collaboration.

We now proudly announce the upcoming workshop inDiyarbakir that will take place fromMarch 13 till March 23

Anadolukultur http://www.anadolukultur.org)Dyarbakir Art Center http://www.diyarbakirsanat.org/

DYARBAKIR

Diyarbakir is a provincial capital in the southeast of Turkey, but most of the Kurds consider it the capital of their imagined state Kurdistan. The city has a population of about 800,000 (the province, also named Diyarbakir approximately 1.5 million) and a long history. In the 13th century B.C., the city, then named Amid, was the capital of an Aramean kingdom.Later it became an important city in the Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman Empires. Until the 19th century maybe up to 30 or 40 percent of the population was Christian and still the city counts many churches, yet few of them in use. Little of the long history of the city is conserved, apart from a few houses of prayer and the imposing wall, build in the 4th century and stretched unbroken for almost 6 kilometers. The old city is located within these walls, but only a quarter of today’s Diyarbakir, which stretches far beyond the old wall. This old quarter is referred to as Sur (literally meaning “wall”). The population of the city rapidly increased in the 1990s, when the Turkish army started to evacuate the countryside in a desperate attempt to destroy the Kurdistan Workers Party, considered terrorists by the Turkish state, but freedom fighters by most of the Kurds.

The workshop will take place in an old part of the center now named Suriçi (meaning “within the wall”) which had been occupied by the army and special army units for years. After the army left, the pro-Kurdish municipality renovated Suriçi. The quarter it is part of is lively and crowded. But beyond the main streets many of those who became displaced in the vicious army campaign of the 1990s live a hard life in ramshackle houses.

The workshop as a ‘common project’
The workshop will take place in an old part of the center now named Suriçi (meaning “within the wall”) which had been occupied by the army and special army units for years. After the army left, the pro-Kurdish municipality renovated Suriçi. The quarter it is part of is lively and crowded. But beyond the main streets many of those who became displaced in the vicious army campaign of the 1990s live a hard life in ramshackle houses.

Using ‘Here as the centre of the world’ as a starting point, the artists are asked to challenge their own vantage point of origin as the centre of their world. By providing an (or multiple) alternative point(s) of reference, temporary residency within a new cultural matrix calls for a refraction of the artists knowledge of the world at large through the prism of the ‘new’ city. In order to experience the various facets of that prism beyond the more familiar setting of the studio or art centre, one street has been chosen in each city as a locus for artistic research. Artists are encouraged to work directly in the street, to talk to people whose daily life intersects with the street’s activities and to see how those site-specific interactions shed light on the wider socio-cultural context.

By becoming ‘regular’ faces on the street and by breaking down the unfamiliar to one-to-one encounters, the artists are invited to look below the surface of difference and negotiate their changing perceptions. Through a process of visual documentation and conversational encounters, the street becomes a source of new experiences and knowledge and in many cases the site for temporary artistic projects whose audience is the inhabitants and passers-by of the street itself.
In each city the approach to the project largely depends on the merger of working methods and artistic languages used by visiting and local participants.As individuals come together with a shared goal, a temporary ‘public space’ is created, in Hannah Arendt’s meaning of the term as a site of transformation fuelled by genuine collaborative effort. In this sense ‘Here as the Centre of the World’ can be conceived of as a ‘common project’.

Institutional Partners Here as the Centre of the World :
Zico House in Beirut,The NIASD in Damascus,ANADOLU KULTUR in Diyarbakir,Dutch Art Institute & the Common Project foundation in Enschede,The German Sudanese Cultural Center in Khartoum,The National Taipei University of Education in Tapei
Sponsors Here as the Centre of the World :
For the workshop in Dyarbakir we especially want to thank the Anadolukultur,the municipality of Dyarbakir and the Consulate of the Netherlands in Istanbul.

The workshops to date and the ‘Here as the Centre of the World’ conference( 2006, May 23 & 24) were possible thanks to the generous support of the Prince Claus Fund, KLM, The Dutch Embassies in Turkey, Syria and Sudan and the National Taipei University of Education (NTUE), the SNS Reaal Fund, Projektburo Roombeek, Rijksmuseum Twenthe, the Prince Bernard Culture Fund and the Gravin Van Bylandt fonds and the city council of Enschede.

Curators Here as the Centre of the World :
Here as the Centre of the World was conceptualised byLucy Cotter, Gabriëlle Schleijpen and Alite Thijsen