About an Armenian statue, an emptied lake, and a fig tree with Ece Gökalp and Larissa Araz

Do you hear the whispers of the lost statue, the ancient glacier lake and the mysterious fig tree? In this episode of Foam Talks, Foam moderator Yasemin Bağcı and artists Ece Gökalp and Larissa Araz dive deeper into the concept of “non-human witnesses”. They discuss how animals, artefacts and places in nature can unveil stories of exploitation, violence and war, uncovering layers of history and memory like detectives. Both artists share how this inspires them and how they support each other in their artistic practice. The episode ends with a ‘Photo Recipe’: a feature of our podcast where Ece Gökalp and Larissa Araz share a photographic instruction based on their practice for all the (aspiring) photographers who are listening. Visit the exhibition After Anahit by Ece Gökalp at Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam until 17 September 2023 or read about her work on our digital platform Foam Explore. Ece Gökalp (Istanbul, 1988) is a visual artist. In her research-based practice, she experiments with different media to explore diverse possibilities inherent to photography. In doing so, she specifically employs photography as a means of perceiving geographies in different contexts. As such her works about different places and landscapes, do not only help to better understand herself, but also unveil layers of (invisible) meanings and information. Gökalp is also interested in tapping into the controversy surrounding photography, the photographic gaze and the indexicality of photography. Larissa Araz (Istanbul, 1990) is an artist and founder of Poşe, an artist run space in Istanbul. Araz focuses on alternative histories, non-human witnesses and denied evidence and the construction of dominant ideologies through institutional knowledge production. Through personal narratives, she researches documents, archives, belongings, ruins, silences, traces, and memories that are not included in, or kept hidden from social memory. Between reality and fiction, she tries to discuss possible futures and unrevealed pasts using mythology and rituals. She uses different mediums in her practice but mainly focuses on text and image-making.