Sibel Horada (*1980 in Istanbul/Turkey) often explores memories of absent things by sifting through personal and collective histories. After completing her BA at Brown University in the United States, she completed her MA at Yıldız Technical University in Istanbul, where she continues to live. Her work is characterised by a dynamic relationship between form and text, which is fed by research in archives. She explores physical and metaphorical sites of erasure, repression and the deliberate manifestation of silence.

In her two channel video work Clearing Space in Still Water, Sibel Horada aims to restore her relationship with Istanbul’s Taksim Square. On one screen, we see two hands practicing the art of marbling in a water basin with a traditional horsehair marbling brush. On the other screen we watch the same brush caress various surfaces around Taksim Square. We watch the artist as she metaphorically gleans colors off these materials and drops them in the still water accumulated in the basins of the Taksim Republic Monument. Through the use of film as a performative medium, she tries to activate this water as if drawing “an analogy between interruptions in our collective memory and [the obliterated fact that] the Taksim Republic Monument was originally designed as a square fountain but never connected to a water source”[1].

[1] L. İpek Ulusoy Akgül, “Waterway: On Sibel Horada’s New Works”, Sibel Horada “Interruption and Flow”

Exhibition Text, 2021