Interview: Heba Y. Amin
The exhibition currently occupying Zilberman Gallery’s exhibition space on the third floor of Mısır Apartmanı is Heba Y. Amin’s second solo show in Istanbul, the first being last year’s The World is an Imperfect Ellipsoid, also shown at Zilberman. For that project, Amin went on a five-month journey, following the path outlined in Al-Bakri’s 11th-century geography book on trade routes in West Africa, Kitāb al-Masālik w'al- Mamālik (The Book of Roads and Kingdoms) and documenting what was absent from the texts of medieval travelers. In addition to works from her earlier series, Amin’s new exhibition at Zilberman also showcases her latest project, also inspired by that five-month journey. In it, she focuses on La Agüera, a former Spanish outpost-turned-ghost town on the Ras Nouadhibou peninsula at the southern tip of Western Sahara.
Amin’s project, which challenges the historical narratives of colonialism, is unique in that it relies on the 1933 memoir of Jesús Flores Thies, the last inhabitant of La Agüera. By using this book as her source material, Amin successfully juxtaposes the colonial past of a town whose independence is still a matter of debate with one man’s longing for his childhood spent in the Spanish Sahara. The buildings you see in the exhibition, buried under dunes yet still standing, represent the destruction left behind by imperial forces. The struggle they evoke feels very current, thanks in part to Amin’s lyrical style and her attempt to confront the material