“Art, in today’s world, has begun to take part in fast consumption ideology; not until what is art and its value is resolved, Turkish art atmosphere regrettably has found itself in the center of that ideology. In recent years, art associations, fairs and galleries that increase in number have each become art authorities, the formation process, materials and indicators of the artwork are posited as open to intervention, and today’s artists as merely “producers”. Creating in accordance with the qualitifcations and the title/content determined by the curator o the gallery owner –no matter how important is the background–, “the artist” introduces an “artwork” profile that cannot go beyond being a product the content of which wears make up, along with an art construction depending on comsumption, to the viewer.Herein, the essence of the exhibition, “Now and Here”, draws attention. In this exhibition in which the artwork-based relationship is established, the explanandum, materials, works formed ruling out any intervention of any “art authority” unfold the adventure of the artist to the viewer; sometimes under a single topic and with several consequences of the same questions dealt uninformed of one another. Among the artists participating, the existence in society, gender, the battle of religious codes reverberating in the general/the particular, and the introverted reflections of the childhood that the individual lost in the midst of the city’s towering walls provide the basis of Güler Aşık’s works while in the works of Ayşe Önuçak, objects breaking away from the context turn into iconographic discourses manipulating/changing the viewer’s conception; and the artist lays that discourse to the viewer in the shape of a fragmentary memory, by using techniques such as video, collage and installation. As Ayfer Karabıyık who bases her works on the notions like ambiguity, elusiveness, uncanny states, explosion pulls the viewer into a paradoxical questioning, the epic images and lyrical colors in Sibel Begeç Balcı’s works offer the flux and reflux between the fantasy and the real. The writings that Serkan Çalışkan uses, the images he pieces together through the notions such as gender, otherness push the barriers of the real; and his works in which the limits of “ autobiography and fiction” resolve alter, form a common language/code and become a new being from the moment they meet the viewer. In the exhibition that includes works not hiding the formation process and thus opening new doors to the viewer in conrast to the productions aimed to be consumed with learn-by-rote knowledge and serving to the brandization ideology, Duygu Sabancılar, by placing the components practiced in the public sphere –such as scripts and mottoes– on the canvas and attributing different codes in a different surface, addresses a newer audience. Like Duygu Sabancılar and the other artists participating in the exhibition, Gökçen Şahmaran, who makes use of screws that are the connecting materials of industrial products, also in a similar vein, clearly shows that the efforts and anxiety and the materials the artist uses in the process of creating are read by the receiver who assigns different meanings on them, that the artwork alone has the artist and the viewer find the least common denominator, and that it preserves its nature while taking it as a mission.Artworks providing several readings for the viewers on a new plane, under the title “Now and Here” on which all the seven artists have agreed mutually, “there” and in “that period of time”, tell their stories to “that viewer” facing with them.
Güneş Hüseyinkulu İstanbul
2012www.guneshuseyinkulu.com
Translated by Yasemin Ertuğrul
Translated by Yasemin Ertuğrul
