Molten Time / Erimiş Zaman /Dema Heliyani
Molten Time brings together sound, memory, craft, and collective encounter through a participatory artistic process developed in Mardin by Sümer Erek and Fauve Alice. Developed during a residency at Meyman Mardin Sanatevi, the project emerged through conversations with local craftsmen, artists, and participants from different backgrounds, exploring how identity, place, and time are shaped through shared experience.
Through workshops, found materials, sound, movement, and collaborative production, Molten Time transforms fragments gathered from the streets, workshops, and everyday life of Mardin into evolving installations. The project reflects on memory not as something fixed, but as a living and collective process — continuously shaped by voices, gestures, traces, and human interaction.
Project was supported by the British Council Creative Collaborations Programme 2024–25 in partnership with Meyman Mardin Sanatevi and Wêjegeh Amed.
Banner
Installation 2025
Sound Ways, Sight Waves of Mardin
Cotton, muslin, ribbon, chiffon, ice, contact mic, iron, stone
(400 x 200 cm)
The banner is a co-created piece of work informed by the 4 workshops we (Fauve Alice & Sümer Erek) ran called Sound Way, Sight Ways of Mardin in December 2024. In these workshops we explored sound as a source of connection between place and time. We tried to think beyond human consciousness, inviting participants to bring objects and inquiring what sounds each object has heard. We then thought; if these objects could make a sound, outside of human language, what would this sound like? These explorations were then transformed into signs, as a way to record what is often ignored. In other workshops we used sound as a source to guide the body and listen more closely and with more curiosity to our environment. The findings of these workshops have been imperfectly recorded onto the banner; words, marks, and impressions have been sewn and stitched onto the material, capturing fragments of the vibrations and stories they carry.
Tablet
Installation 2025
Sound Ways, Sight Waves of Mardin
Mdf, carved wood (240 x 150 cm)
The giant tablet sits like the Rosetta Stone as you enter the room—an ancient artifact of indecipherable languages. But here, instead of stone, we are confronted with a cheap slab of MDF, its surface etched with enigmatic marks. This piece sits in direct conversation with the banner: while in the workshops we created signs to represent sounds emanating from objects, this tablet originates from a sign-making business and serves as a quiet archive of labor. The grooves in the MDF form a material record of every order the shop has received and cut—a ledger of human activity and intention. These marks, carved into the surface, are not just records of commercial transactions; they are the imprints of labor. The two small lonely wooden hands signal the skills and repetition of an unseen workforce and craftsmanship which is here resisting continuous waves of automation.
The Last Supper Of The Sage At Sunset
Installation 2025
Bread, construction rebar, lace, cotton, rusted steel, stones, galvanized metal, led light.
(200 x 80 x 160 cm)
The title evokes The Last Supper, exploring ritual, nourishment, and finality, in the materials of the everyday. Here, bread—the symbol of sustenance and communion—is placed in dialogue with industrial materials, searching to find the sacred within the mundane. Central to the installation is the slow alchemical process of rusting and rotting- a collaboration enterprise between material and environment that captures moment in flux. The playfulness with materiality invites viewers to consider how materials mutually transform and reshape one another, dissolving rigid distinctions; all matter becomes active and entangled in co-creating the world.
Lamentations Of The Word
Installation 2025
Printed canvas, cotton thread, candle, copper, led lights, lace.
(240 x 200 x 60 cm)
In the backdrop of this work, we see a face caught between visibility and invisibility, the shroud in front of her is inscribed with words in two languages. This shroud becomes a repository of fragmented narratives— words connecting to the journey of the figure as a child navigating the complexities of her families’ story as political refugees in the early 2000s. These first and last words act as thresholds, marking both the beginning and the end. The piece speaks in dialogue with the two skylines; one in stitched cotton the other in wood and copper, evokes a tangible geographical and emotional landscape. It captures the interplay of place and displacement, rooting the personal narrative within a broader political and cultural context.
The Air Is As Light As A Tin Can In The Sound Of The Radio
Installation 2025
Led light, galvanised metal, digital image, perspex
(100 x 17 x 10 cm)
This installation takes inspiration from Nazim Hikmet’s evocative poetry, particularly his line about the air being as heavy as lead—a poignant call to arms. In our contemporary moment, the air feels transformed; constant
brightness, both literal and metaphorical, now acts as its own kind of obscuring force. The fragmented skyline depicted in the work reflects this altered reality, suggesting the fractured and polarized ways we understand and
engage with the world in a shifting global landscape.