Özgür Kar’s practice unfolds at the intersection of sound, sculpture, animation, and installation. Drawing on folklore, experimental theatre, early animation, shadow-play traditions, and television culture, Kar develops non-linear theatrical scenes in which desire, mortality, boredom, and longing recur as conditions that are at once intimate, absurd, and otherworldly.

HEAVY GROUND depicts a romantic, operatic encounter between two flies caught on a glue trap. The flies serenade each other before entering a tender final union, surrounded by dead flies trapped in the same sticky landscape. Flies are a recurring motif in Kar’s work, recalling the musca depicta, a motif within the ancient memento mori tradition of meditation on mortality and decay. Here, Kar confronts the visceral repulsion flies typically provoke by finding their relationship worthy of affection, song, and lament.

Created in collaboration with musician Arnljótur Sigurðsson, the duet draws on an iconic recording by Clara Rockmore—the celebrated theremin virtuoso of the early twentieth century—of Manuel de Falla’s 1915 Andalusian gypsy ballet, El amor brujo [Love, the Magician], connecting disparate emotional and cultural registers across time.