January 31, 2019, 19:19

As a part of her ongoing solo exhibition We are not Innocent on the second floor of Depo, Gizem Karakaş will do a performance titled “We Remember, After Joe Brainard and Georges Perec” on Thursday, January 31 at 19:19. The performance was realized for the first time in 2017 with the artists of HAH collective, as a part of the exhibition vesile. This time Karakaş will be performing alongside Fuat Eşrefoğlu, Lara Ögel and Ekin Kano, whom she has collaborated with during the making of the exhibition. The performance departs from the books of Joe Brainard and Georges Perec with the same title “I Remember”.

In the early 1970s, New York poet and artist Joe Brainard wrote a letter to a friend. “I am way, way up these days over a piece I am still writing called I Remember. I feel very much like God writing the Bible. I mean, I feel I am not really writing it but that it is because of me that it is being written. I also feel that it is about everybody else as much as it is about me. And that pleases me.”

At once intensely personal and strikingly universal, Joe Brainard’s book I Remember is a list of memories, each of which begins with the incantation “I remember”. Inspired by Brainard’s book concept, even though he never read it, Georges Perec wrote also a book called I remember in 1978. Unlike Brainard, Perec’s book brings together unearth memories that were ‘almost forgotten, inessential, banal, common, if not to everyone, at least to many.’ At the end of the book Perec left a dozen or so blank pages so that the reader can record his or her own ‘I remembers’.

We Remember offers a collective ritual to fill together the blank pages in Perec’s book and to remind to each other what we can not forget.

We are not Innocent is on view at Depo until March 17, 2019.