Taş yerinde ağırdır.(The stone is heavy in its place.)

Gallery I

Unfolding the layers of arrival and departure, Diyar Mayil invites visitors to encounter the intimacies of safety and security through a series of site-responsive artworks. With uncomfortable experiences often pushed to the periphery in exchange for momentary relief or comfort, these moments rise back up. Mayil echoes these subtle and personal moments that quietly and slowly evoke the lack of safety that regularly goes unnoticed or is eventually internalized.

Mayil’s solo exhibition presents a series of site-responsive sculptures that outline CIRCA’s peripheries.Taş yerinde ağırdır. (The stone is heavy in its place.) is an installation of transformed infrastructural pieces using glass, graphite, bronze, metal/aluminum and brush bristles. By holding the handrails attached to the walls, being drawn towards the graphite curtains facing the entrance, and observing the all-glass fire sprinkler hanging from the ceiling, Mayil purposefully draws the visitor away from the center and towards the physical perimeters of the space. Accumulating individuals at the fringes, Mayil re-enacts a movement of departure for visitors to arrive at the margins of the gallery. The peripheries or fringes stand for all that is deemed undesired or to be swept under the rug but nevertheless hold space inevitably. All that is driven and directed away from the centre inhabits the peripheral experience, including personal modes of being such as tenacious mental states, challenging feelings, unspoken memories, undealt worries, and neglected instances. This meticulous task, taken on by Mayil in situ, guides the viewers to inhabit and experience comfort at these peripheral spaces.

Prioritizing the sensory over readily-available meaning, Mayil provokes a dialogue around safety and discomfort through assembling a rich choice of material interactions: durable with fragile, heavy with light, hard with soft, cold with warm, and flammable with non-flammable. Defying the promised functionality of the handrail merely as a source of support, the visitor’s grasp encounters the vulnerable caress of the soft hidden bristles. Accompanied by the fragility of the all-glass sprinkler, the dark graphite curtains, and the flimsy bag excessively filled with bronze fruits, Mayil showcases an ensemble of sculptures constantly negotiating the measure of vulnerability on site.

Text by İrem Karaaslan

Authors Bio 

Irem Karaaslan (she/her) is Kurdish from Istanbul, Turkey and a second-year graduate student in Art History at McGill University. Her research currently explores how contemporary artists unravel the interwoven relationship between the so-called migration crisis and long-enduring schemas of coloniality in their artworks. She is particularly interested in understanding the themes of home or transitory spaces like the sea within the migratory routes. The threshold-like spaces that enable one to eventually arrive home, if fortunate to survive wearying and exigent migration routes. She has been working with L’atelier des artistes en exil in Paris, France to further gain more hands-on experience with exiled artists from all around the world. She was likewise part of the eighth edition of Montréal Monochrome responding to Fanon’s renowned question “Can we liquidate the past once and for all?” at Articule.

Artists Bio 

Diyar Mayil is an artist working in sculpture, installation and performance. She addresses issues of comfort, discomfort, adaptation and acceptance of different bodies, in public and private contexts.  She is the Laureate for the Claudine and Stephen Bronfman Fellowship in Contemporary Art (2022) and the recipient of Liz Crockford Award (2023). Her work has been supported by Canada Council for the Arts, Conseil des arts de Montréal and has been shown at La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse, Printemps numérique, Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, NARS Foundation in NYC and Centre Clark in MTL. Upcoming commitments include solo exhibitions at Articule and FOFA Gallery in Montréal. She holds a BFA from Concordia University, where she has recently completed her MFA.  Originally from Istanbul, she now lives and works in Montreal.

Acknowledgements

Diyar Mayil would like to thank: Abbas Akhavan — Monique Dechamps — Perry Droudy (Gicleur Moderne) — Kandis Friesen — Nicolas Forlini — Samuel Guertin — Andrew Hoekstra — Kelly Jazvac — Irem Karaaslan — Michelle Lacombe —Laser Art Mtl — Jeanne Letourneau — Brendon O’Neill — Alberto Porro — Gabriel Scott-Seguin — Fayez Sharabaty Carmine Tagliamonti — Kevin Teixeira— Liz Xu

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for Arts, the Bourse Groupe Canva,  Bronfman Foundation and CIRCA art actuel. 

Video credit: Noémie da Silva

Photo credit: Jean-Michael Seminaro