There is a place without gravity. 
Anyone who goes there ascends. 
Only if they are willing to pay 
the price of letting go of themselves 
to spiral into the illusion. 

Once they are in the air, 
there is no place to go but higher. 
When they have made the decision, 
there are no stairs that could bring them down.
Falling is the only way down. 

Doesn’t freedom mean that one can be who they are 
instead of becoming someone else, 
someone who can rise above?  


Before these difficult times we were living in such conditions where we had no time to think or to digest all the inputs we were getting from every side we looked. While trying to be productive we were running constantly without having a clear idea where we were actually going. 

It was so often that I used to think that I must transform myself into something to become someone because everything was changing so fast and so drastically that I always felt behind. I saw so many people doing so much stuff that was so in the time and seemed so fashionable. Not to point any fingers, I tried it myself and I also failed horribly because of my personal ideals that I have been building.

Even though i tried to resist, at some point I’ve realised that i was not myself anymore. I felt like I was becoming a clone and I was getting more and more away from myself while chasing the promised lands where there is no gravity that could raise me above.

After everything stoped I suddenly found myself in an empty space where I could not even remember my own voice. Then it all came back to me and i started to go back to my roots which is actually classical painting. So now I’m working on these 3D painting series that will be telling the stories of my own personal transformations. And maybe even ours.

Tale of Succession is the first of them and it is about questions that most of us ask who wants to become somebody.

It’s about going for things as well as questioning the steps, decisions that we are making and and possible outcomes that we might be fearing.

It’s about prices to pay and consequences to face.

Do we really need to alter ourselves to become someone to get and stay in the illusion of success?

Graphic Design by Zeynep Schilling
Special Thanks To Evelyn Bencicova and Adam Csoka Keller
Latex Translucent Offsprings by: HYDRA

Tale of Succession

Mi†ra presents nine-sum sorcery

Mi†ra is a newly formed collaboration that unites the computer music of HATAM with Persian/Kurdish vocalist & songwriter Hani Mojtahedy and percussionist Colin Hacklander in a remarkable synthesis of traditions and practices, featuring visuals by Evelyn Bencicova and 3D artist Enes Güç with graphic design by Zeynep Schilling. This bold new work presents itself as a lament, telling an allegory of global complicity with strange and dark forces, and engages with ‘oil’ as a ‘narrative lubricant’, a 'hydrocarbon corpse juice'…

nine-sum sorcery debuted at Berlin Atonal’s main stage in August of 2019 and draws inspiration from Sohrab Sepehri’s modern poetry and Reza Negarastani’s theory-fiction book titled, Cyclonopedia which imagines oil as a sentient being.  nine-sum sorcery’s epic structure situates three traditional songs in alternation with three distinct audio-visual chapters; the songs are sung in Farsi and Kurdish and the a/v chapters unfold under the following titles:  The Wheel, Cyclone and Xerodrome.

During the verses, the enigmatic electronic music of HATAM provides the base for the masterful and emotive vocal interpretations by Mojtahedy.  The onstage musicians operate jointly as sorceresses, conjuring massive eruptions of sculptural digital sound, voice and percussion, giving rise to the monumental audio-visual chapters, of which the visuals unfold in recurring form:  original graphic illustrations of specific occult imagery give way to journeying 3D animation videos which are abstract yet evocative, finally arriving in the final section of disembodied digital voice and epic transcendence.

In live presentation, Mi†ra is completed with the stunning HYDRA Sartorial Latex Uniform Offsprings by Agf HYDRA.

Supported by Jarrett Gregory - a project by LABOUR.


nine-sum sorcery

Tale of All Victories is the 3rd 3D painting from the series "The Tales" . This series is about the personal growth and healing process and choosing the battles to win is one of those lessons one needs to learn to be able to grow in the desired direction. This work is focusing on the feeling of loss after victories. Giving away many things to be able to "win" sometimes hurts individuals more than it helps. Learning how to choose what battles one should fight for is one of the important lessons we all need to learn.

A poem written for the work:
Under the source
That was promised to heal all your wounds,
Which you craved so deeply,

Did you burn everything to get here?
Did you really think that it would be safer here?

That you can take off your armour,
put down your weapons?

When there is no other place to go to,
Where did you think all the wildlings would go?

Watch out for the ones trying to come closer.
Look at all the ones watching you.

What do they all think?

After the war is over,
when the winner stops fighting.

Do they still know who they are?
What were they even fighting for?

Tale of All Victories

So many of our wishes and dreams as well as our fears are being implemented to us by others while we are ignoring our own deeply buried parts and running away from them.

It is difficult to accept these shattered pieces of ourselves and even harder to make big changes to be able to own them. Although as long as we take the “steps”, we grow to be ourselves.

All the little things piling up on each other seems to be impossible to deal with sometimes. Specially in times when they are combined with all of our insecurities.

But healing also starts after we take these little steps and accept the fact that we all are in a constant progress.

And after learning how to respect others progress I started to learn to respect to my own. Cheers to becoming ourselves.

Tale Of Letting go is the second 3D painting from the series of “The Tales”.

The 3D scans are from the shooting for Tanec Praha with Evelyn Bencicova. Composed in Autodesk Maya and rendered with Solidangle Arnold

You can see it printed for the first time on our last issue of Year Zero

And thanks for my amazing friends for their input and help! Zeynep Schilling and Evelyn Bencicova. Without them this would not exist

Tale Of Letting Go

 ‘Work_In_Progress’ by Evelyn Bencicova and Enes Güç has been exhibited as part of 'NEW VIEWINGS' a project of Barbara Thumm Galerie in Berlin. Curated by Philipp Bollmann.

The motionless figure of an androgynous giantess occupies almost the entire gallery space in its entangled posture. On its body and around it, small scaffolding grows upwards. But the construction site is deserted. Only the figure, which resembles an avatar, remains in a calm state. A state of "being in between". Between day and night. Between dream and reality or even between life and death? It almost seems as if the figure is still being brought back to life.

One is inclined to think of Mary Shelley, whose novel character Victor Frankenstein created an artificial human being 200 years ago - in a time of great upheaval and discovery. Today we are once again at a historic turning point in technology. Is that what Evelyn Bencicova  and Enes Güç are alluding to here?

Or are they even illustrating a creation of the „Self-image“? The construction of the persona for external perception has advanced to a mania that was only enabled by the possibilities of the digital world. We use our extended abilities to make ourselves appear larger than we presumably are. The oversize of the figure is a testament to this. And the scaffolding becomes a metaphor for the process of construction, work in progress. How will it develop? To what extent can it grow?

These questions cannot be answered. Like the figure itself, we as recipients also remain in an intermediate stage. Somewhere between fiction and reality, the visible and the invisible and what we think to know and what we can imagine.
(Philipp Bollmann)


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