As part of the exhibition In Real Time, NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery presents Entrusted Ground, a dance performance that was conceived as part of artist Gözde İlkin’s corresponding installation.

The 40-minute performance is a collaboration between Gözde İlkin, choreographer Aslı Öztürk, musician Berke Can Özcan, and NYUAD Art Gallery’s curator Duygu Demir. It features dancers Barış Diker, Alara Erdem and Umut Özdaloğlu.

Duygu Demir writes:
“Gözde İlkin’s Entrusted Ground installation can be seen as a motif to be inhabited, or perhaps, it is merely a cave in the crevices of our minds. It is conceived as a home to homeless stones, a shift for dancers and twigs, a prayer for fractures, or a dream enveloped in echoes that come from the four corners of the world. On the one hand, the installation is a landscape painting stretched to three dimensions, on the other, it is a stage for sound and movement.”

The performance, like the installation, revolves around fire, air, earth, and water — the four elements that comprise the universe, according to Greek philosophers. In the performance, the dancers embody these elements, tracing an abstract journey of transformation from dust to the human, and beyond. Öztürk’s choreography, informed by somatic bodywork, takes cues from the imagery of İlkin’s two-dimensional textile works, carrying them into the three-dimensional space, and activates the artist’s soft sculptures with movement to create moving landscapes. The music is composed and performed by Berke Can Özcan; he combines the soundscape of the field recordings he created for the Entrusted Ground installation with sections from his previous album, Mountains are Mountains. Originally, the Entrusted Ground performance was developed simultaneously with Gözde İlkin’s solo exhibition of the same title in the summer of 2022 in Istanbul for artSümer.

The performance will take place at the NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery on May 8 at 6:30pm, and May 11 at 12pm and 5pm.

For more information, please visit nyuad-artgallery.org.

Related