FATMA BUCAK: WHILE THE DUST QUICKLY FALLS | Kunsthaus Dresden - Germany: Solo presentation developed in collaboration with the Kunsthaus Dresden

Each of the 350 screen-prints delicately crafted into stone-like sculptures in Perpetual lure and insistent fear represents one of the remaining wildflowers of the Golan iris (Iris hermona). These endangered irises grow almost exclusively in the Golan Heights, a militarised zone where tank exercises and settlements have trampled them. Furthermore, climate change, cattle

grazing, and expanding vineyards have decreased their populations. Many of the irises that still exist grow in minefields.

The artist has reimagined the Golan iris’s deep purple veins, brown spots, and underlying white and lilac colours. She presents them here as a field and with colours that do not adhere to reality: crimson reds, sharp yellows, green, indigo blues, and verdant greens. Perpetual lure and insistent fear proliferates the irises again, in a place accessible to all. They take form of stones, as a reminder of their natural environs where they grow in rocky basalt soil. Yet, they are not heavy. As fragile paper stones, they suggest, in the artist’s words, that “nature, although strong, can no longer recover itself.”