The General’s Stork
Heba Y. Amin

Lecture performance

September 15, 2017 / 18:00

In late 2013, Egypt made worldwide headlines when authorities detained a migratory stork traveling from Israel to Egypt because of an electronic device attached to its body. It was suspected of espionage. Almost one hundred years earlier, Lord Allenby, the British High Commissioner in Cairo, completed a major phase in biblical prophecy by launching ‘bird-like machines’ to capture Jerusalem from the Ottomans. The General’s Stork is a lecture performance that converges biblical prophecies, colonial narratives and the politics of surveillance to investigate the contemporary conditions of state paranoia that turned a migrating bird into an international spy.

Heba Y. Amin is an Egyptian visual artist, researcher and lecturer. She is currently teaching at Bard College Berlin, is a BGSMSC doctorate fellow at Freie Universität, and a recent resident artist at the Bethanien artist residency program in Berlin. Amin has received many grants, including the Shuttleworth Foundation Flash Grant, DAAD and the Rhizome Commissions grant. She is the co-founder of the Black Athena Collective, the curator of visual art for the MIZNA journal (US), and curator for the biennial residency program DEFAULT with Ramdom Association (IT). Furthermore, Amin is also one of the artists behind the subversive graffiti action on the set of the television series Homelandwhich received worldwide media attention.

Free of admissions, drop in. This event will take place in the auditorium. The talk will be in English with simultaneous Turkish translation.

Temporary Exhibition

15th Istanbul Biennial

Pera Museum hosted the 15th Istanbul Biennial, organized by Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV) and sponsored by Koç Holding. The 15th Istanbul Biennial brought together artworks by 55 artists from 32 countries, all addressing different notions of home, belonging and neighbourhood.

15th Istanbul Biennial

An Ottoman Ambassador and a French Bulldog at Covent Garden

An Ottoman Ambassador and a French Bulldog at Covent Garden

Celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, Pera Museum invites artist Benoît Hamet to reinterpret key pieces from its collections, casting a humourous eye over ‘historical’ events, both imagined and factual.

Midnight Horror Stories: The Last Ferry <br> Galip Dursun

Midnight Horror Stories: The Last Ferry
Galip Dursun

I remembered a game as I was waiting in the passenger lounge for the ferry to arrive just a few minutes ago. A game we used to play at home when I was young, in my country that is very far away from here, a relic from the distant past; I don’t even remember how we used to play it. The kind of game that makes me feel a thousand times lonelier than I already am among the crowd waiting to get on the ferry.

Souvenirs of the Future

Souvenirs of the Future

You try to remember the future. A bird painted on the ceramic panel in a historical palace has found its place on the wall. The tiles of a church and a mosque have been painted on canvas. The pattern of a centuries-old ceramic plate appears before you on a velvet curtain.