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.

Louis Isadore Kahn (1901-1974)

Louis Isadore Kahn (1901-1974)

Louis Isadore Kahn was born in 1901 to a Jewish family in Pärnu, Russia (today Estonia), far from Philadelphia where he spent his whole life, worked, fell in love, and breathed his last. Kahn family emigrated to America when he was five years old. 

Good News from the Skies

Good News from the Skies

Inspired by the exhibition And Now the Good News, which focusing on the relationship between mass media and art, we prepared horoscope readings based on the chapters of the exhibition. Using the popular astrological language inspired by the effects of the movements of celestial bodies on people, these readings with references to the works in the exhibition make fictional future predictions inspired by the horoscope columns that we read in the newspapers with the desire to receive good news about our day.