Orkan Telhan, Assistant Professor of Fine Arts; Emerging Design Practices, is participating in CULTURUNNERS for The Armory Show, curated by Omar Kholeif as part of the “Focus MENAM” initiative, and realized with lead cultural partner Edge of Arabia, and education partner Art Jameel. Sited in a mobile artist studio in the form of a modified RV, CULTURUNNERS at The Amory Show features custom-built artistic technologies to map, archive, and broadcast voices and ideas from the “Focus: MENAM” section of the fair. Telhan’s project is “A Now for MENAM.”
From the artist:
A Now for MENAM integrates various historical and contemporary practices of time keeping across the cultural geography of Middle East, North Africa and the Mediterranean. Instead of unifying the different time zones and calendar systems used within this vast geography, the calendar offers a set of discursive perceptions and experiences of time embedded within different cultural artifacts and symbolisms—jokes, recipes, news, or visualizations of highfrequency trading. The application brings together the slow and the fast, the personal and the social, the past and the future and algorithmically curates a ‘now’ to be shared across MENAM.
The calendar works as a mobile application that delivers images, videos, information or text from different archives and online sources. The format refers to the calendars published in Turkey since 1900s known as the “educational calendar with time” (Turkish: Saatli Maarif Takvimi). These calendars offer a daily digest of practical information—quotes, recipes, remedies, suggested names for newborns—as well information about significant events from the past. A Now for MENAM offers a contemporary take on this format and offers a critical commentary on the periodicity, synchronicity and the continuity of temporal experiences in an intellectual geography shaped by a multitude of social, cultural, and political experiences. The calendar also functions as a temporal navigator for the CULTURERUNNERS RV and customizes its content based on the RV’s travel routes.
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