ISMYRNA

Part of the project I Stared at Beauty so Much. Over twenty-five years ago, the artists met poet and painter Etel Adnan and a strong friendship bound them. Both Joana and Etel drew their origins from the once Ottoman city of Smyrna, known today as Izmir. After the collapse of the Ottoman empire, Joana’s paternal Greek family was forcibly expelled by the nascent Turkish army. Etel’s mother, also Greek, who had married a Syrian officer from the Ottoman army, was also uprooted from Smyrna and settled in Lebanon. Both families transmitted, respectively to their daughters, memories of the place shaped by the sorrow of loss, coloured by the grief of forced displacement, and irrevocable departures.

Confronting their constructed imaginaries of Smyrna, Joana and Khalil question this constitutive legacy. Can we live today, as Adnan asks, “out of nostalgia, in an eternal present?” Revisiting family stories and personal recollections serves as the prism through which the region’s modern history is explored–shifting borders, identitarian affiliations, multiplicity of belongings, and place-making.

The program General Relativity, Take Two is curated by Greg de Cuir Jr.

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.