THE CURE
Vooria Aria, Ozan Çağlar, Canavar, Timur Celik, Naomi Cohen, Gabriel Doyle, Umut Erbaş, Cemre Gürbüz, Maryam Hojjati, Ismet Köroğlu, Gohdar Salahaddin
curated by Ezgi Bakçay, Barış Seyitvan
July 1 - October 2, 2021
OPENING June 30, 7pm
The living, therefore the mortal body is the central object of all politics. Such as on the AIDS crisis, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic many writers expanded on biopolitics by exploring the relationship of health and politics. The cure is not a biological fact independent of cultural and political variables. But the health is constructed through social and political criteria that produce sovereignty or exclusion, protection or stigmatization, life or death.
This interdisciplinary exhibition curated by Ezgi Bakçay from Istanbul and Barış Seyitvan from Berlin focuses on body, politics, health, community and the care: What is the cure for a body for human or unhuman world? What means to be healthy, what is a disease? Where to Kind the cure for a body and for the body of the community? The artists from different geopolitical backgrounds open a discussion around the concept of cure and remedy, link it to others including to well-being, trauma, memory and the right to the city.
The Cure include also an interdisciplinary research project on the non-Muslim-run hospital foundations in ICstanbul: The Surp Pirgiç Hospital, the Balikli Rum Hospital, the Surp Agop Hospital, the Balat Or Ayaham Hospital and the Bulgarian Hospital. They were each built collectively at the peak of the cholera epidemic by Greek, Bulgarian, Jewish and Gregorian and Catholic Armenian inhabitants of Ottoman Istanbul. Though founded at a time when hospitals were conceived as institutions of control, they were run by and for their respective community members, distinguishing them from other medical facilities in the city. Beyond treating them as spaces exclusively used for medical treatment, the exhibit will show that they also operated as community centers for social assistance, gardening, socialization, care for the poor and vulnerable, schooling and property donation. Today, however, each hospital Kinds itself in a different state: whether conKiscated, demolished or still operating as a prestigious establishment.
Installation views
Photos: Jakob Lindner
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