The Turtle //  السلحفاة

Akademie der Künste, Berlin

2018

Akram, Lela and Soran, three artists in their early thirties, who all grew up in completely different conditions in different parts of the world, place their childhood and youth photos next to one another and notice that their biographies relate to each other more than they thought they would. The performance is a visual deconstruction of these memories.

Idea and artistic direction: Akram Assam

Text and dramaturgy: Eleonora Herder (Lela)

Video design: Soran Ahmed

Voice: Elisabeth Leistikow

Light design: Mohammed Rahi

Support: Ingvill Fossheim und Ursula Hobmeier

Premiered on April 28, 2018 in Akademie der Künste Berlin.

Many thanks to TARKIB Baghdad Contemporary Arts Institute

What is your life? What more is it than a bunch of mental photographs? An image, a bit of sound, a colour, a marmelade glass full of beachsand, the taste of humus… something that some day for whatever reason you decided to frame and save in the archive of your brain. Moments that will be lost in time, like tears in rain.

And through the possibilities of internet those memories become a huge collective biography, with images reaching you parallelly from all possible parts of the world. Holiday photos mix with photos of bomb attacks, pictures of a sunday brunch at a roof top in a mediteranean city mix with the image of a new born child in a Greek refugee camp, pictures of a wedding party with pictures of somebodys aunt in hospital about to die from cancer. All at the same device, at the same time and all those images constitute your memory somehow.

Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried.