States of Democracy

 

Mia Adams      Hina Barla     Yasmina Chavez      Jake Dockins      Lindsay Garcia     Martin Krafft    Michael Marks

Ashanti McGee      Stacy Arezou Mehrfar        Kelley O’Brien

 

 

Hina Barlas

Title: SOS, 2019

About the work:

SOS/ Save our Souls The artwork named S.O.S consists of sound and writings of Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ articles no. 1, 3, 5, 9, 13, 14, 15, 18 and 26; these articles are related to the concept of deportation-citizenship, freedom of expression and beliefs, captivity-liberty etc. The sounds empowering the text in the work are recorded personally by artist in Turkey.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) had been issued on 10th of December, 1948, after a huge demolition of World War II. While this declaration was hoped to prevent such a huge mass destruction to occur again anywhere in this world, today, human soul, human’s free being is giving ”signals” (S.O.S is used as a help signal in Morse code and commonly stands for Save Our Souls) of being under threat of extinction again in various parts of the world.

The work S.O.S calls for a review of the “collective memory” that is composed of the experiences of destructions caused by human that humanity has been gaining throughout it’s historical period. Furthermore it questions the functionality of verbalised or written solutions for the sufferings that are witnessed. The deformation of text, referring to the contradiction between the aim and current situation while obstructing the article to attain their wholeness of meaning.

Biography:

Hina Barlas, born in 1985, Lahore, Pakistan. In 1998 she migrated to Turkey with her family - she still lives in Istanbul, the city to where she had migrated. In 2018, graduated from Marmara University Faculty of Fine Arts, Photography Department. She's currently doing her M.A. in painting department in Institute of Fine Arts in Marmara University.

The artist, mostly makes video based works, has a multi-disciplinary approach and uses diverse mediums in her works. In the process of her artworks, influenced by her own past related to migration, she deals with the problems like the sense of non-belonging and detteritorialization alongside the topics as human rights and the confusion of identity for human caused by migration.

 

Duration: 3 minutes 6 seconds