New Exhibition at Kasa Gallery
“Topography of Desire” while talking about nature, mountain, rock, soil, stone, encompasses, embraces, completes, heals, reflects them. At first glance, an extraordinary docility is observed in the thing(s) retained by artists; maybe this is “an attachment in which the retained one appropriates the retaining one underhandedly,” the reality that the subject is identified with the object by means of “looking,” that “we become the object of the other’s desire,” a mutual “irrational desire.” Artists, with their works at this exhibition, catch a sense of this visual perception experience as a research initiative towards understanding the world, as a desire of empathy; they construct topographies into which they penetrate sometimes indirectly sometimes metaphorically, and present it to the viewer.
Seçil Büyükkan, with her four-canvas painting, A Nice Place to Die series, constructs a panoramic landscape in the gallery space. This universe of the artist reflected to those paintings as a way of inner healing, an act of therapy –a universe that doesn’t accommodate any clue about space and time– presents imaginary topographies flowing into the viewer’s perception from the canvas surface. Alper Aydın intervenes in volcanic stones that carry a kind of memory of the inner order of nature, with protractors that carry knowledge about the human order. Aydın’s work titled Organic Mistakes that takes his observations of and (temporary) intervention in nature –a decisive principle of his artistic practice in general– via photography to the exhibition space, interprets his perception and experience of nature based on visual oppositions.
Ali İbrahim Öcal constructs a mountain landscape with a 3-D diagram in the gallery space, with his visual, mental and corporeal experience. Öcal, with this work including a research on painter-model and viewer-viewed relation, converts characteristic earth folds, their sharp and amorphous forms into a shining mass at the gallery with the material, colors, depth and light he uses, creating reflections in the perception of the viewer. The title of the work is the physical coordinates of its location: 41° 1’25.87”N - 28° 58’30.51”E. Ali Şentürk completes the parts of the rocks he photographed, that actually vanished away in natural processes, or their invisible parts located underground, with a combination of collage, drawing and sketch techniques. By tackling the human desire towards the embodiment of things in the face of infinite possibilities/opportunities in nature via “imagination and reality,” he helps us to reach to the knowledge of stone, hence its being. Historical and Geological Corrections is located in the gallery space as a modality of the idea of the explicitly existing thing and the mental possession of it.
The exhibition will be visited until December 30th at Sabancı University Kasa Gallery
Kasa Gallery
Bankalar Caddesi 2, Minerva Han, Karaköy, 34420 Istanbul
Phone: (0212) 292 4939
E-mail: kasagaleri@sabanciuniv.edu
http://kasagaleri.sabanciuniv.edu/