Zoom Fantastic Wednesday

'A Turtle in Ten Seconds'
Rojda Tuğrul
Animation/Drawings ink on paper, (234 sheets), 148 x 210 mm, 2019.

A manual handbook of drawings aims to capture different relationalities and temporalities of a particular place, around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The book envisions both submerged and emerged elements in relation to the dam projects in upper Mesopotamia. While the reader visually observes these dynamics, the infant Mesopotamian soft-shelled turtle – which is an endemic species that lives alongside the affected rivers and placed at the centre of the disrupted pages – moves for ten seconds upside-down in a moment of a water turbulence. The still images of this animation cover hundreds of pages; they follow a desire to dilate timeframe and conceptualise an endangered species' lifespan. A very fine dissecting process of the soft-shelled turtle – in terms of time and place – captures a political and social entanglement of this particular land which is agonized from the effects of an ongoing war.

Rojda Tuğrul is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher from Diyarbakir, primarily working on research-based art practices concerning identity in relation to space. Her projects generally examine this binary relationship through photographs and audiovisual installations. Following an MSc in Veterinary Science she graduated from Mardin Artuklu University in 2016 with an MA in fine arts. Currently, she is a PhD-in-Practice candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

ZOOM Link:
https.//akbild-ac-at.zoom.us/j/98126388608>
Meeting-ID: 981 2638 8608