The Lost Mosaic Wall Lecture at Ashkal Alwan

As part of the Home Works 6 Platform, Ashkal Alwan is hosting a lecture by Johann Pillai called “The Lost Mosaic Wall”.

This presentation traces to the present, through historical mishaps and the political mayhem of wars, military coups and chance discoveries, the trials and tribulations of the 227 square-meter mosaic wall by Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu for the Turkish Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World Fair. This was Turkey’s first modern prefabricated building, which brought together most of the living major figures in the country’s history of art, architecture, classical music and opera, and politics.

As world’s fairs are essentially curations of narratives of official national identity, how does one represent “nation” or “country” or “region” outside of its geographical location? To what extent can a wall or border represent (rather than inside/ outside inclusion or exclusion) linkage and unification? Does the historiographical “writing of the disaster” (Blanchot) participate in the transference of its trials and trauma (LaCapra, Rancière) and preclude the renewal of tradition, ownership or reconstruction (Toufic)?

Can archives, exhibitions, artworks and monuments resist absorption into memorial narratives, and instead express fragmentation and forgetting? The Lost Mosaic Wall follows a tale of discovery and detection spanning fifty years of the social and cultural histories of Turkey and Cyprus.