A Minaret for the General’s Wife comes to Richmond Art Gallery, April 22 to July 31
Turkish-Canadian artist Erdem Taşdelen’s installation centres on a little-known architectural oddity in Lithuania
Erdem Taşdelen: A Minaret for the General’s Wife. Installation view: Mercer Union, 2020. Courtesy the Artist. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid.
Richmond Art Gallery presents A Minaret for the General’s Wife by Erdem Taşdelen April 22 to July 31
A new solo show by Turkish-Canadian artist Erdem Taşdelen sheds light on the nature of storytelling and how our personal experiences and biases can influence the way we understand the world around us.
A Minaret for the General’s Wife centres on a little-known architectural oddity that the artist first discovered on a Turkish travel blog several years ago: a freestanding minaret in one of Lithuania’s oldest cities.
While being familiar with the Ottoman style of this minaret, Taşdelen was intrigued by its location and the fact that it was not connected to a mosque. After learning that the minaret was built in 1880 by a Russian army general named Eduard Totleben, Taşdelen was participated in an artist residency in Vilnius in 2019, which gave him the opportunity to do further research at the capital’s State Archives and the Regional Museum in Kėdainiai.
Weaving together fact with fiction to tell the object’s origin stories, the exhibition features archival photographs, miscellaneous artifacts, an audio recording of a call to prayer sung in Turkish, and a video shot on-site at the city park where the minaret is located. These are all arranged in an installation that resembles a rehearsal space, where Taşdelen’s multi-faceted historical narratives hold the potential to be transformed into theatrical productions.
A Minaret for the General’s Wife is guest curated by Julia Paoli and Toleen Touq and is organized and circulated by Mercer Union and the South Asian Visual Arts Centre in Toronto, where the exhibition was first displayed in 2021.
“A Minaret for the General’s Wife speaks to both the potential and the limits of storytelling,” RAG director Shaun Dacey said in a release. “We’ve seen in media, pop culture, and social movements that objects and images can become incredibly powerful vessels for ideologies. Erdem Taşdelen reflects on this by sharing real and imagined moments in history that link migration, displacement, and appropriation. His interest lies in how meaning is made — and re-made — when objects are taken out of their original context. This feels especially poignant now, as we see nationalistic machines of myth-making at play in our everyday lives. This exhibition is a reminder that our own biases can influence and manipulate the way we read texts, see images, and perceive objects.”
Taşdelen has been an artist-in-residence at the Delfina Foundation, London; Rupert, Vilnius; and KulturKontakt Austria, Vienna. He was awarded the Joseph S. Stauffer Prize in Visual Arts by the Canada Council for the Arts in 2016, the Charles Pachter Prize for Emerging Artists by the Hnatyshyn Foundation in 2014, and long-listed for the Sobey Art Award in 2019.
The exhibition launch and artist talk will be held April 23 at 2 pm.
More information is at Richmond Art Gallery.
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