Entrusted Ground

A 40-minute dance performance conceived as part of artist Gözde İlkin’s installation in the current NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery exhibition In Real Time (which ends on 9 June). It’s a collaboration between İlkin, choreographer Aslı Öztürk, musician Berke Can Özcan, and NYUAD Art Gallery’s curator Duygu Demir; it features dancers Barış Diker, Alara Erdem and Umut Özdaloğlu. Demir says the installation is conceived as “a home to homeless stones, a shift for dancers and twigs, a prayer for fractures, or a dream enveloped in echoes that come from the four corners of the world … On the one hand, the installation is a landscape painting stretched to three dimensions, on the other, it is a stage for sound and movement”.

The performance, like the installation, revolves around the classical elements of fire, air, earth, and water. The dancers embody those elements, tracing an abstract journey of transformation from dust to the human, and beyond. Öztürk’s choreography, informed by somatic bodywork, takes cues from the imagery of İlkin’s two-dimensional textile works, carrying them into the three-dimensional space, and activates the artist’s soft sculptures with movement to create moving landscapes. Berke Can Özcan’s music combines the soundscape of the field recordings he created for the Entrusted Ground installation with sections from his previous album, Mountains are Mountains.

The performance takes place on 9 May at 6.30pm, and again on 11 May at 12pm and 5pm.