By Heidi Trautmann

Stones, nothing but stones dancing around your head, hundreds of them dangling from the ceiling, stones made of paper pulp, in all colours and sizes.

Ismet Tatar has always had a deeper bond to stones and this fact has made me think of the essence of it, the deeper meaning of stones…. Stone is a part of an entity, a morsel of our globe, fallen off from …a mountain, a rock, reduced to smaller sizes by wind, pressure, water. We walk along a coast, a mountain path, and pick up some because of their beauty, their smoothness, or we are visiting a foreign space of our globe, on holiday, and to remember the beauty of it, we take one home as a souvenir. I have quite a collection myself, a piece from Aetna volcano, a geo from the island of Lefkas, a piece of basalt from my last trip, Georgia and Armenia, picked up in the Caucasus mountains and so forth.

We look up into the sky and see our stars, always there since our childhood to guide us, they are rocks, stones that once left our globe perhaps, into the universe to throw back the light from the sun.

Stones, it has so many meaningful importance for us, we carry them, broken and polished, on our fingers, around the neck, we build our houses, fences with them, we break them, grind them to make paint from it,  and one day we have one placed on our grave to be remembered, back to earth, where we come from.

When you walk through the dancing stones in the exhibition hall, think about it. I have not asked Ismet Tatar what her deeper reason was to create this sky of dancing stones, I will not ask her because I think, every visitor should have his/her own thoughts about it. Would you smilingly touch them and make them dance, or would you rather think about having a stone around your neck?

Go and find out at EMAA’s. The exhibition is still on until September 30, weekdays 16:00 – 19:00 hrs and on Saturdays 10:00 – 14:00 hrs.