Goat on the Mountain, Moon in the Sky, Fish in the Water: Talk with rezzan gümgüm, Zeynep Kezer, Barış Yıldırım and Çiçek İlengiz

Wednesday, July 12, 18:30 (online)

As part of the exhibition Goat on the Mountain, Moon in the Sky, Fish in the Water, on view at Depo until July 14, an online talk will be held with the participation of the artist rezzan gümgüm, academician Zeynep Kezer and lawyer Barış Yıldırım, moderated by the researcher Çiçek İlengiz, on the Turkish state’s efforts to exert itself on the Upper Euphrates region and the ongoing legal struggle to protect the Munzur Stream ecosystem.

rezzan gümgüm’s exhibition Goat on the Mountain, Moon in the Sky, Fish in the Water, invites its audience to reflect on sovereignty, biodiversity and cultural diversity through the experience of an ecological construct exemplified by Dersim, where humans are only a part of nature. In Dersim, where ecological destruction continues in all directions, mountain goats, the Sun, the Moon, mountains, stones, trees and the water are sacred according to the Rê/Raa/Yol faith. This exhibition calls attention to the sanctity of all living and nonliving beings in nature, such as the Mizur/Munzur River and its water, the Mediterranean trout and the mountain goat, and the dams, hydroelectric power stations, mountain goat hunting auctions and mining projects that endanger them. All these practices, which cause ecological destruction in Dersim, not only cause an environmental collapse, but also damage the sacred spaces of its collective memory. The videos and installations in the exhibition strive to break the invisibility of different forms of violence inflicted on the sacred geography of Dersim.

This event will be held in Turkish. Please register through this link:
Registration link

For detailed information:
rezzan gümgüm – Goat on the Mountain, Moon in the Sky, Fish in the Water

rezzan gümgüm is a visual artist who works across various disciplines, such as performance, video, installation and photography. Through her works, she explores artistic expressions of personal and collective experiences in the structured everyday life. She particularly focuses on the ecological and political problems in urban and rural areas, and addresses issues such as gender, identity, nature and biodiversity with an ecofeminist perpective and sincerity. She is also a founding member of Rê collective.

Prof. Zeynep Kezer is the Post-Graduate Research Director at the School of Architecture Planning at Newcastle University. Her current book project, tentatively titled Engineering Eastern Turkey: People, Place and Power in the Upper Euphrates Basin, focuses on the changes in both the demographic structure and the physical and cultural geography of Eastern Anatolia in the 20th century under increased pressure by the State. Kezer has a monograph entitled Building Modern Turkey: State Space and Ideology in the Early Republic (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016).

Barış Yıldırım was the Dersim Representative for the Human Rights Association between 2006 and 2013 and actively worked on fundamental human rights violation cases. He has carried out various legal processes, most prominently the official recognition of the Dersim ‘38 Genocide and the clearance of mines in Dersim, the province with the highest number of anti-personnel mines for internal security purposes, as well as served as the President of the Tunceli Bar Association between 2016-2018. Yıldırım is the spokesperson for the Dersim Cultural and Natural Heritage Protection Initiative and a member of the Environmental and Urban Law Commission of the Union of Turkish Bar Associations and the Lawyers of the Environmental and Ecological Movements (ÇEHAV). Yıldırım is the lawyer of the first and most important lawsuits against dams, hydroelectric power plants and mining projects in Dersim and other provinces such as Erzincan and Bingöl.

Dr. Çiçek İlengiz completed her PhD thesis focusing on the relationship between radical political imaginaries and sanctity in 2019, at the Research Center for History of Emotions hosted by the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin. She became part of research projects on collective memory and religious heritage. In 2013, she started working for the research project Beyond Restitution: Heritage, Dispossession and Politics of Knowledge hosted by Forum Transregionale Studien. You can access her writing on collective memory, the politics of emotions and world cultural heritage on academia.edu.