Conducted in depth and projected at length is an untimely collaboration between İz Öztat and Zişan that attends to the coincidence between the imaginary potential of a river island and the destiny of Adakale, a submerged island in the Danube River within the borders of present-day Romania. Drifting between various courses of time —the time it takes for the river to claim its bed and an for island to emerge, the time required for an island to become a territory, the time one devotes to being possessed, the time invested in taming and interrupting the flow of water until an island is flooded, the movement of articulating a drifting island in the present, the vision of a future which reconstructs the island as a tourist attraction, the time necessary for shaping the course of discourse dedicated to imagining otherwise— İz and Zişan search for something missing.

Upon encountering Adakale in 1915 as an Ottoman exclave in the Balkans and a site of projected imperial longings, Zişan was inspired to write her utopian fiction titled Island of Cennet/Cinnet (Paradise/Possessed). Located on a river that acts as a border between two nation states, the autonomous Cennet/Cinnet commune relates to time as being possessed, to gender as shades of blue, to resources as commons and to family as a meandering passage. Zişan’s text, sketches for Island of Cennet/Cinnet and selected documents relating to Adakale from Zişan’s Utopie Folder are exhibited.

İz Öztat’s journey leads to an absent island since Adakale was submerged in 1968 due to the construction of Iron Gates Dam. İz engages with the present that surrounds its absence and imagines a river island articulated collectively. The séance, held somewhere between the absent island of Adakale and Zişan’s Island of Cennet/Cinnet, manifests as a dialogue between İz and Zişan that accompanies the exhibition in the form this publication. - SAHA