Performance Installation 2022 Presented at: Group Exhibition, In a Multiple-Perspective, Yarat, Space for contemporary art, Baku Azerbaijan, 01.12.2022 – 30.4.2023, Curated by Firat Araboglu

In Nezaket Ekici’s live performance, “Layers” she explores the conceptual passage of time and how its many ‘marks’ are retained in stone or other material—documenting history and culture within a physical creation. Standing in front of a stone both taller and wider than her, Ekici begins to sketch the outline of her body into the rock. As she undertakes the both physically grueling and diligent process of etching her own silhouette into the boulder, she slowly begins to take off the many costumes she is wearing. From a modern red costume, all the way to animal furs reminiscent of hunter gatherer styles, Ekici undresses in accordance to time’s reversal: her costumes represent a tracing back from contemporary to the antediluvian. Additionally, the tools she uses also highlight this retrospective theme of time: beginning with a chisel to do the carving, her final etching is made with stone instead. The piece draws direct inspiration from the Gobustan rock engravings of Azerbaijan, which span a staggering timeline of 14,000 to 50,000 years. These prehistoric petroglyphs, depicting ritual dances, hunting scenes, and symbolic gestures, are some of the earliest known efforts to represent the human condition through image. Ekici channels this ancestral gesture—not through depiction but through embodiment—using her own body as the historical medium. In this sense, she empowers the body as an existential template upon which time and the histories of human experience can gain a formal corpus—where time is seen in the form of what one does to stone, how one remakes and augments the body that is now, with the echoes of the past. In her costumes she visually reverses the modern trajectory of civilization. Each layer removed enacts a journey backward through time, suggesting that history is not a linear path but rather an accumulation: sediments of collected identities worn and collected over evolutionary millennia. This progression turns the body itself into an archive, a living palimpsest that carries both cultural and corporeal memory. Perhaps most poignantly, in the final act of carving, Ekici abandons her metal chisel and takes up a stone. This gesture is not just symbolic; by relinquishing the precision of the chisel in favour of a material part of our own history, Ekici returns the tools of artistic generation themselves to an earlier creative language. Ultimately, “Layers” asks what it means to trace and retrace anthropology within nature: whether the marks we etch into the world are ever truly permanent. The performance becomes not only an act of physical labor but also an existential meditation on time, erosion, and the enduring question of how we are remembered. After the performance, all of the costumes remain with the stone as a relic and documentation of the exhibition. (Text: Jono Wang Chu)

Large Ancient Boulder, Small Stone, Hammer, Chisel, 4 Costumes, Platform

3 hour live performance

CAMERA: YARAT, Space for Comtemporary Art, Baku, Azerbaijan HEAD OF INTERNATIONAL PROJECTS : SADAGAT ISAYEVA INTERNATIONAL PROJECTS ASSISTANT : MARYAM BAGHIRLI OFFICE MANAGER: CHIMNAZ ALIYEVA CURATOR OF THE GROUPEXHIBITION: FIRAT ARABOGLU CHIEF CURATOR OF YARAT : FARAH ALAKBARLI Head of PR and Communications Department : HOKUMA KARIMOVA