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Nilbar Güreş  – The Moment, 2024

Based on a research with art historian Simone Florio A seven day Performance for a 1842 Square Meter Drawing. Untimely.
Commissioned by Pierre bal Blanc  For the exhibition  The Cynics Republic At Palais de Tokyo, Paris, November - December 2024.

Nilbar Güres’s contribution to the exhibition “THE CYNICS REPUBLIC – A SCORE BY PIERRE BAL-BLANC” held from November 13th to December 1st 2024 at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris consisted of the creation of a new, personal mythology through the ancient practice of graffiti.

While the aim of the exhibition is to try to offer a counter-narrative of the history of performance – rooted not in historical avant-gardes but in the abstract and empirical tenets of cynical philosophy – Nilbar Güres “cynically” minimizes the tools at her disposal, using just a single permanent black marker) to maximize the expressive possibilities of her artistic endeavor. This is evident not only in the massive dimensions of the pictorial support (the 1842 square meters of the exhibition space walls) but also in the absolute eclecticism of the subjects represented.

It is no coincidence that Nilbar’s performance occurs during the second week of the exhibition, which is dedicated to the “Shamelessness” of cynical philosophical practice. This is understood not as sterile explicitness, but as a radical lack of restraint in addressing historical, socio-political and spiritual issues from an uncomfortable perspective. Here, recurring themes of Nilbar Güres’s work reappear, such as the drastic but joyful vindication of queer identity and a clear political conscience in solidarity with the world’s marginalized. She comments on the exhibition institution itself, creating a meta-representational art that is deeply critical and, therefore, cynical.

Starting from research conducted over a year in Naples in collaboration with me, Simone Florio, on the historical-artistic routes of the Mediterranean that form a collective subconscious of myths and rituals, Nilbar Güres presents herself as an intrinsically unreliable yet radically sincere narrator: she uses the dream dimension and her own personal experiences as primary tools to explore reality and identify guidelines to orient herself.

This does not mean that her work is fundamentally diaristic and self-centered, but quite the opposite: for Nilbar Güres, the personal is political and the subjective is collective. For this reason, her art makes a metaphorical leap to speak to and about everyone, creating a new historiography can be created, not chronological or causal but inclusive and extensive – queer, transfeminist and postcolonial. In her performance, Nilbar reworks numerous sources and references with a philological and postmodern attitude, such as the graffiti found in the excavations of Pompeii, the Odyssey, the Divine Comedy, the Thousand and One Nights and some famous works by Michelangelo, Titian and Gianlorenzo Bernini. By doing so, she questions the hetero-patriarchal lens through which we usually interpret our historical and socio-political events. The syncretism she elaborates allows her to address pressing contemporary issues, such as gender-based violence, media censorship and the war crimes in Gaza, with candor and firmness.

A key element of the work is the monumental map drawn by Nilbar Güres on the lower level of the exhibition space, which provides spatial coordinates for performing the simultaneity of the times she describes. In an ambiguous and deliberately imprecise map, Nilbar highlights Delphi (Greece), Cumae, Tivoli (Italy), Alexandria (Egypt), Ankara (Turkey) and Jerusalem (Israel) – cities where, according to Marcus Terentius Varro, the Sibyls, priestesses of Apollo with prophetic abilities, were located. Alongside these extraordinary female characters, whom classical mythology places in a condition of subordination yet who professed their own truth from the darkness of their caves, the artist includes Elif, her great-grandmother who was a Kurdish-Qizibash shaman and has marked definitely Nilbar’s imagination, and Gisèle Pelicot, whose infamous rape trial is shocking France and the whole world. These women do not submit to the hetero-patriarchal archetypes imposed on them by the society; instead, they overturn them, forcefully affirming their own version of reality and proud, irreducible identity.

In Nilbar Güres’s performance, artistic practice becomes a personal and collective reflection with a centripetal trend that, symmetrically but in the opposite direction to a cultural Big Bang, outlines a Big Crunch. Here, time and space, images and words converge into a single point in order to create a new way of looking at and inhabiting the world: The Moment, precisely.

Ultimately, the mythology created by Nilbar Güres aims to refute what Trimalchio told in Petronius’ Satyricon: to the question “Σίβυλλα, τί θέλεις;” [“Sibyl, what do you desire?”] her new Sibyls – Gisèle Pelicot, Elif, Scheherazade– now answer: “Zῆν θέλω” [“I want to live”]. Shamelessly.

 

Simone Florio

Art historian and Research assistant

Video & Photo Credit: Nilbar Güres & Simone Florio 

“THE MOMENT“ Performence Booklet Will Be Available Tomorrow

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Performance Video Documentation

Performance Video Documentation

Photo Documentation

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