Sister Sylvester
Presented by BRIC
photos: ©Jill Steinberg
“This always intriguing company continues to create unexpected, challenging work that approaches story and ideas from multiple angles and generates a thrill with unusual juxtapositions.”
– AMERICAN THEATER
The North American premiere of The Eagle and the Tortoise invites the audience into a live sound and video installation where they collectively read a hand-made book. The book tells the story of a young student from Turkey who became an icon of leftist resistance, an armed militant, a political prisoner, and finally, a proxy soldier in an American war. This visual essay traces the history of the aerial view—in art, mythology, journalism, and warfare – to make the case for other ways of looking.
“A complex, deeply reflective work that weaves together strands of the personal, political, and mythological with deft subtlety.”
– CULTUREBOT
SCHEDULE
Thursday, January 11 @ 8:00 pm
Friday, January 12 @ 8:00 pm
Saturday, January 13 @ 12:00 pm
Saturday, January 13 @ 5:00 pm
Sunday, January 14 @ 12:00pm
Sunday, January 14 @ 5:00pm
Thursday, January 18 @ 8:00pm
Friday, January 19 @ 8:00pm
Saturday, January 20 @ 5:00pm
Saturday, January 20 @ 8:00pm
Sunday, January 21 @ 5:00pm
Sunday, January 21 @ @ 8:00pm
Run time: 60 minutes
CREDITS
Writer, director & book co-designer: sister sylvester
Composer and performer: Ozan Aksoy
Immersive sound design: Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste
Cinematographer: Civan Özkanoğlu based on a design by Onur Karaoğlu
Video design: Robin A. Ediger-Seto
Dramaturgy: Andrew Kircher
Illustrator & book co-designer: efrîn nowar
Lighting design & technical direction: Bruce Steinberg
Audio technician: Daniel Dominguez
Production manager: Marin Day
Book design consultation and printing by Gabe Greenberg
Tortoise Hospitality: Vallejo Gantner
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Sister Sylvester is a multimedia artist based in New York and Istanbul. In collaboration with Deniz Tortum she created the VR documentary Shadowtime, (’23) which premiered at the Venice International Film Festival and continues to tour to festivals including IDFA, GIFF, and Thessaloniki Film Festival; and the film Our Ark which premiered at IDFA (’21) and has screened at festivals internationally. In her live work she creates visual essays and books that become performances, spatial narratives that play with spoken and written text to create communal reading experiences. Most recently Constantinopoliad, with a live-score by Nadah El Shazly, was commissioned by the Onassis Foundation, and premiered at National Sawdust in NYC (‘23); and The Eagle and The Tortoise, which showed as a work-in-progress at Ferus Festival and premiered at Frascati Theater, Amsterdam, as a part of IDFA On Stage (‘22). She is a current resident at ONX Studio; a 2019 MacDowell Fellow; an alumnus of the Public Theater New Works program and CPH:DOX lab. She teaches a bio-art class, “The School of Genetically Modified Theater,” at Colorado College, and has also taught and lectured at MIT, Princeton, UCCS, Columbia University, and Boğaziçi, Istanbul.
Civan Özkanoğlu’s (b. 1983, Adana) interdisciplinary work traces the everyday. He is interested in seemingly mundane stories and daily absurdities and how they converge in public space, mass media, the art world, and in the realm of politics and collective memory. His practice has increasingly moved from photography to other visual, sculptural and performative interventions that tend to the conceptual tensions within artistic production and the and the exhibitionary forms it enables along with memory and state violence from a gendered perspective. He has exhibited works at SALT, Istanbul; National Academy Museum, New York; Brand Library&Art Center, Los Angeles and Istanbul Modern, among others. He has done numerous artist-in-residence programs including Cité des Art, Paris and most recently at ISCP, New York. He lives and works in Brooklyn and represented by .artSümer Gallery, Istanbul.
Ozan Aksoy’s destiny was set with his birth name – Ozan – an ancient title for mystical bards in West Asia. As a child growing up in Turkey, he first learned to play the saz (lute) from his father, and soon demonstrated remarkable breadth as a multi-instrumentalist, becoming proficient in many of the string, woodwind, and percussive instruments of the region. He developed a passion for the music of ethnic and religious minorities in his country including the Kurds, Armenians, Laz, and Alevi, among others. Later in college, as an early member of the critically-acclaimed ensemble Kardeş Türküler (meaning Ballads of Solidarity), Ozan and his colleagues performed the songs of these unrecognized and suppressed peoples, pushing the boundaries of inclusion in Turkey. During his time with the group, they released four albums and toured extensively throughout Europe, spreading their message of diversity and acceptance. Ozan then relocated to the United States to complete a doctorate in ethnomusicology and further develop his multicultural repertoire. He creates an acoustic collage of overlain tracks and his lush melodies and textured voice evoke a mysterious and meditative sound that transcends borders.