Fatma Bucak's 'In Prestissimo' at Peola Simondi Blends Music, History, and Loss

Fatma Bucak (born 1984, Iskenderun; lives between London and Istanbul) presents 'In Prestissimo' at Peola Simondi in Turin, a solo exhibition that uses musical notation as a structuring device to explore geopolitical and environmental trauma. The show features works such as 'Man is dead,' a slow-motion video of a column supporting a fish crushed by a stone, symbolizing sacrifice and war; 'Perpetual lure and insistent fear,' with painted stones referencing the Israel-Lebanon-Syria conflict and the extinction of the Iris Hermona on the Golan Heights; and 'Sum of the misdeeds and consents and cowardly acts,' Assyrian and Sumerian-style sculptures evoking artifacts looted from the National Museum of Baghdad in April 2003. Central themes include fire, as seen in the fragile paper ashes of 'Black Ink' and the installation 'They burned it all,' which features a video of five pairs of silenced female musicians on a Istanbul theater stage, with the Kurdish phrase 'Hertişt şewitandin' ('They burned it all') repeated off-screen, referencing historical devastations of the artist's homeland. Bucak's practice, supported by the Italian Council, reimagines lost life forms, materials, and sounds into immersive works that resist censorship and destruction.