Arie Amaya

After spending over a decade in the world of contemporary art, mostly in the capacity of art critic and curator, during a long research stay in Athens, I made the decision to return to my intellectual roots in continental philosophy and classical archaeology. But with this U-turn came also the realization that art is a knowledge system and worldview so totalizing that it will always inform the entirety of my practice.

I became keenly interested in the growing relationship between contemporary art and archaeology in the Eastern Mediterranean, and the different ways that recent thought in contemporary art and philosophy overlaps with archaeological theory, and conversely, and how contemporary art can help us make sense of crucial, sensitive debates about heritage, cultural repatriation and museology. 

In 2022 I completed my most ambitious project to date, in collaboration with Feleksan Onar, the exhibition “After Utopia: The Birds”, at Sadberk Hanim Museum in Istanbul, and the first contemporary art exhibition at an archaeological museum in Turkey, spanning across theater, performance, film, sculpture and archaeological artifacts. The exhibition was centered around an eponymous play written by me.

One of the main questions in my work, although it often takes the form of archaeological artifacts and debates, is the problem of time, and how time doesn’t simply exist in the background, but is being constantly enacted and created by a complex assemblage of objects, landscapes and peoples. I also think about the concrete politics of linear chronological narratives, globalization and the dissolution of linear time.

Since 2023, I have presented a number of lectures/performances on the topic of archaeological time, in institutional contexts in Italy and Greece, dealing with lost cities, artifact histories as paradigms for expanded temporalities, disaster and forced migration. These lectures draw on materials from my experience living and researching in Turkey, Greece, Cyprus, Lebanon and Italy, over the past decade.

During my residency at Saari, I intend to start working on a new lecture about a clay nail from an early Bronze Age Mesopotamian temple in the ancient Sumerian city of Girsu, near Lagash in modern Iraq: How did this artifact find its way to the National Museum of Finland? How did Near Eastern antiquities land in Nordic museums which did not actively participate in the colonial plunder of the 19th and 20th century?