This performance video began one day in Istanbul, while Eliyah Sedaghati and I were sitting in a café reading Edmond Jabès’s The Book of Questions. Sara asks her father about Yukel, and he tells her, “One day, you will create Yukel from your imagination.” Eliyah and I looked at each other.
At the time, we were both experiencing different forms of death: for Eliyah, the death of the body; for me, a death shaped by time and absence. In different ways, these experiences had left us relating not only to people themselves, but to the images we created of them when their presence was no longer accessible.
The Golem emerged from this condition. A body made in the place of an absence; a figure suspended between matter and life, being and becoming. In the story of the Golem, language has the power to animate what has been formed and to return it to lifeless matter. Through making our own Golem, we gave a body to the images we had created of those who were absent.
Setayesh Ghasemi & Eliyah Sedaghati
