Posthuman Studies Lab
Kiymet Dastan
About the author\artist:
Kıymet Daştan (b. 1980, Turkey) is an artist based in Istanbul. She holds an MA in Design from the Domus Academy in Milan, Italy, and a BA in Sculpture from the Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in Istanbul, Turkey. She recently completed the fellowship of Homework Space Program at Ashkal Alwan fine art association in Beirut, Lebanon (2019).
Her experiments with form stem from conceptual projections and generate questions about memory, legacy, and conflict between systems and social roles, while exploring the poetic horizon of materials. She is looking for imageries of fragmented memory among the circulated and repeated symbols and signs of everyday life.
http://www.kiymetdastan.com/
Memory Burn
Am Afraid To (Not) Forget derives from my experimentation with melting discs – archival devices that now are becoming obsolete – creating pseudo-geological, crystalline disfigurements, highlighting the material and metaphorical ties between thick geological layers and today’s speeded-up technologies. These discs include CDs, DVDs, Archival Gold CDs-DVD’s, M-Discs and others. Taking off from the evocative patterns I traced along the Beirut National Museum and the Beirut Mineral Museum, ancient sites, and disappearing pirated video stores in Beirut, this process traces the way material conditions, human societies, and media technologies shape how memory is recorded, preserved, replaced or erased.