Creative Portfolio.

Keywords: jewellery, text, and performance around craft, ritual, and transformation.

 

Hara is an independent space for art and culture celebrating creativity through original exhibitions, performances, concerts, events, and learning programmes. Hara’s exhibition Where in History Are We? Craft. Ritual. Transformation. brings together jewellery designs, texts, and performances created by participants from a wide range of disciplines and perspectives.

 

The exhibition brings together 17 artists who do not typically work with jewellery, each attempting to translate their own artistic methodology into a craft-based practice. It also explores the kinds of knowledge, symbols, and social and cultural meanings that jewellery can produce.

 

Alongside the jewellery pieces, the exhibition features texts by Nazlı Ökten, Dr. Ayşe Coşkun, and Efe Murad, as well as a site-specific performance created by five performer-choreographers. The performance, titled The Performance of the Jewellery, features sound design by Yusuf Huysal. A three-channel video installation of the piece is presented in the exhibition, offering a new perspective on how jewellery interacts with the body.

 

The exhibition is shaped around three core concepts: Craft, Ritual, and Transformation.

 

It begins with a simple question: what happens when artists, using their own creative methods, begin to ask the kinds of questions a craftsperson might ask? This process starts with the idea that the jewellery is not simply made for a viewer but for a wearer. Who will wear the pieces in this exhibition? Where, and in what kind of world, will they be worn? This fundamental decision also informs how each work situates itself within the exhibition.

 

The Craft section features works by artists who focus on production-based practices. The Transformation section highlights works in which jewellery redefines either a material or a concept. The Ritual section includes works that imagine contemporary ceremonial roles for jewellery. Curator Onur Hamilton Karaoğlu notes that many of the works belong to more than one section, which is why the exhibition also includes hybrid categories: Ritual–Transformation, Craft–Transformation, and Ritual–Craft. For Karaoğlu, this fluidity between categories reflects a form of inclusivity that speaks to the state of contemporary society. Where in History Are We? invites its visitors to take on the performative task of interpreting where each work might belong.