Cansu Yıldıran: Haunt the Present | Presented by Protocinema

Cansu Yıldıran: Haunt the Present

Presented by Protocinema

Lower Gallery at The Arts Center at Governors Island
October 5 - November 10, 2024

Protocinema, in partnership with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC), presents Cansu Yıldıran’s (pronounced Jan-Sue Yuhl-duh-rahn) New York premiere: Haunt the Present, a photographic-sculptural installation drawing on their own experiences of the pain of being forced to leave a place that you love, and investigating dispossession and migrations. Cansu Yıldıran’s Haunt the Present, will be on view from October 5 until November 10, 2024, at the Arts Center at Governors Island.

Every summer of my childhood, my homeland was like the hair my mother would cut at the start of each season, saying, ‘Its roots are in you, it will grow again.’ I used to think, ‘My roots are there, waiting for me.’ My mother never lied to me, so why would my homeland deny me?

Ayse Yildiran, the artist’s mother

Cansu Yıldıran's photographic-sculptural installation Haunt the Present explores the profound impact of population movements and human intervention in natural landscapes. Yıldıran’s journey begins in Trabzon, Çaykara Village, in the Black Sea region, and the Kuşmer Plateau, where their family has lived for generations. Their grandmother and mother were denied land ownership, a denial which is understood locally as an extension of the violent genocide committed by the then-emerging Turkish Republic against the Pontic Greeks between 1914 and 1923. During this time, hundreds of thousands of Pontians were killed, and an estimated 1.5 million were expelled. Yıldıran's artwork comes from Begüm Özden Fırat and Ayça Yüksel’s text The Dispossessed Will Find a New Way to Settle, which goes into further detail:

This geography is built upon layers of historical dispossession that have remained unspoken but continue to haunt the present. While Kuşmer is administratively within the borders of Bayburt, it is registered under the title of 373 households living in the Şur (Şahinkaya) village of Çaykara, miles away from the plateau. The owners, who have embraced all the rights and powers of modern private property regimes, including the exclusion of others, prevent those who migrated from the village, like Yıldıran's family, from acquiring land or housing in the plateau. The patriarchal pattern, expressed as the “unique rules and traditions, customs, and sanctions” of Kuşmer, collaborates with the institution of private property to prevent women from owning property on the plateau. It is an ostensibly communal men's association that claims collective ownership of the plateau, reaping and sharing the grass equally.

Begüm Özden Fırat and Ayça Yüksel, The Dispossessed Will Find a New Way to Settle, Hara Istanbul, 2024

Yıldıran's installation and video capture the tender love they hold for their homeland, as well as the pain of being forced to leave due to racial and economic pressures. As these conditions persisted, Yıldıran's family was compelled to move repeatedly. In their work, Yıldıran melds images of the Black Sea with those from a road trip across the United States, from Michigan to the Pacific Ocean. By intermingling these visuals, they fuse loss and dispossession with curiosity and the faint hope of finding a way forward.

In Haunt the Present, Yıldıran uses large-scale structures composed of fragmented images to create spaces for collective expression while allowing their materials to naturally take shape. The installation features photographs printed on sail-like suspensions, hinged from wooden columns of an 1870s munitions warehouse on New York’s Governors Island (facing Ellis and Liberty Islands) —a site with its own history of displacement of the indigenous Lenapepeople. Visitors are invited to navigate through a web of life-sized images, guided by an audio track leading to a video that returns repeatedly to Yıldıran's cherished home in the mountains, high in the clouds. This home, which she loves deeply yet longs for with a grief-like intensity, becomes a poignant symbol throughout their work.

Yıldıran’s Haunt the Present is made against a dark backdrop of a world rife with catastrophes and crises concerning the movement and existence of people across countries, nations, territories, and borders. Within Haunt the Present, the artist acknowledges the suffering endured under various oppressive conditions, highlighting how exclusionary policies and pressures often force women into collaborative efforts and partnerships. In this way, the experiences of women from diverse backgrounds converge into a single, powerful narrative. Yıldıran’s story, interwoven with their personal history, serves as a metaphor for the struggles faced by many women.

...we are invited to see the past and present together. … [These] photographs do not want us to look at the past simply because it has passed. When these photographs come together with all the other photographs, they also ask us to believe in the existence of a shared future. History will be continually constructed somewhere.

Onur Karaoğlu, Hara, Istanbul, 2024

Cansu Yıldıran’s exhibition Haunt the Present opens on Saturday afternoon, October 5, just one month before the American presidential elections. In a time when asylum, immigration policies, and issues of racial and class divides are at the forefront of the political landscape, their work offers a deeply personal and resonant perspective.

This exhibition will be accompanied by Cansu Yıldıran Haunt the Present Postcard Project, a selection of printed postcards, complete with stamps and a post box, ready to be mailed anywhere in the world that still has a post office, free at the exhibition.