Concept Text:
As Alfred Jarry said more than a century ago about ceasing to worship the past of regressive traditions, ”We shall not have succeeded in demolishing everything unless we demolish the ruins as well.’ I propose here an attempt to “demolish the ruins” by fabulating a scenario from a speculative present, where patriarchy has already self-destructed. Because nature abhors a vacuum, this project imagines an emergent nonlinear feminist collective intelligence that fills in its void, here identified as a Virtual Matriarch presented through a metafiction of indirect evidence in the form of digital artifacts constructed out of Anatolian mythemetic, textual and pictorial sources. The Virtual Matriarch uses me as one of its hosts and is imagined as an impersonal transcendental force that is at once self-generating, self-unfolding, and self-differentiating. It re-codes, re-forms, and re-constructs everything in its path by injecting emancipatory perspectives and destroying all traces of patriarchal remains. The digital artifacts are its manifestations from a perpendicular present, and represent a kind of co-authorship between myself and the Virtual Matriarch. These artifacts are not merely excavated from the past, but rather from a speculative outpost of the present. “Demolish the Ruins” serves as a playful and provocative platform to display micro-narrative experiments through video and web performances with the explicit aim of razing the ruins of patriarchy’s linear death drive.
Bio:
Endam Nihan is a Turkish video and performing artists, currently splitting time in between Turkey and the US. She creates single and multi-channel video installations, image essays, objects, performances, and VR works. Her practice critically and humorously discloses correspondences between images of daily life, female representation, emerging technologies, and pop cultural forms of consumption and circulation. Her works have been exhibited internationally in experimental online exhibitions, traveling screenings and group exhibitions. She is also one third of the artist collective Troll Food. Recent exhibitions include URL:IRL at the Dunlop Sherwood Gallery, eRR0R (arrhythmicity- VR gallery) on dalpofzs.com – a commissioned VR work for Trinity Square Video’s VR App Gallery, Body Anxiety on bodyanxiety.com and the Rapid Pulse International Performance Art Festival etc. https://www.endamnihan.com/
