The exhibition ‘My Love the Dead Soldier' will be opened to the public at the Art Rooms Gallery in Kyrenia on Wednesday, October 9, 2024, at 19:00. Named for the first poetry book by the poet, novelist and critic Mehmet Yashin, this exhibition is one of several international events being held in Britain, Greece, Turkey and Cyprus to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the publication of the book. It introduces the viewer to selected fragments from Yashin's life and literary art, organized through the concept, editing and archival work of Anber Onar, Oya Silbery and Dize Kükrer, in collective collaboration with the writer. 

 

Mehmet Yashin has published eleven poetry books, four novels, ten essays, anthologies, literary reviews, and interview collections, among which are several award-winning books. He has been a pioneer of multilingual and multicultural literature for over four decades, since his ground-breaking critical work on the literatures of Cyprus, Greece and Turkey, "Step-Mothertongue" (Middlesex University Press, 2000, London); and his poems and novels have been translated into more than twenty languages. 

 

Yashin has spent much of his life between Nicosia, Istanbul, Ankara, London, Cambridge, and Athens; and his works are international as well as in the Levantine tradition, blending the Turkish and Greek alphabets, languages ​​and cultures with the events of daily life. His personal history, which challenges all kinds of classifications, is intertwined with his poetry, which places Cyprus on the international literary map. His works reflect a life shaped by losses, but which has transformed them into literary events and identities that reflect his own multiple identities.

 

This archival exhibition presents fragments of Mehmet Yashin's literary and artistic journey. They include representations, visual moments, and objects from the house in Nicosia, Yenişehir (Neapolis) neighbourhood where he spent his childhood, and which bears the traces of the breaks and ruptures of history and his personal experiences: his library, documents from his childhood and early youth, personal items, some of the poems from his book My Love the Dead Soldier, his published books and an archive of his works translated into other languages.

     

Through these fragments, the exhibition reflects some of the divisions in Yashin's own life story, unsettling established ones, starting each chapter anew, and taking into account the experiences that have changed the direction of the writing journey of one of Cyprus's internationally most recognized figures, a poet/writer and a world citizen who defends universal values.