Constructed Nature Exhibition Talk

Quick Art Space, which became operational in May 2023 within Quick Tower with the initiative of Maher Holding, will hold its first exhibition curated by its founding director Nergis Abıyeva between October 28 - December 1, 2023. The exhibition titled "Artifact Nature" features works by Gülçin Aksoy, Nazan Azeri, Seçil Büyükkan, Ahmet Rüstem Ekici & Hakan Sorar, Ekin Saçlıoğlu and Özlem Şahinler in various genres such as painting, video, installation, weaving and sculpture.The exhibition, which includes works that will be on view for the first time, is based on the architectural features of Quick Tower and the way it positions itself. The architectural privileges of the building, its relationship with its surroundings, the dogs coming in and out of the revolving door of the lobby with its huge windows, the lush, vibrant trees around the building, the crows perched on the trees, the cats sleeping in the lobby..."Constructed Nature" is an exhibition beyond the white cube experience, based on the inviting and embracing atmosphere of Quick Tower, located in the heart of Kozyatagi, where thousands of visitors spend time or 'pass by' every day. "When we think of nature, do we only think of virgin forests or endless seas? Can urban areas that are properly intervened and healed by human hands strengthen our relationship with nature? Can we move beyond the dichotomies of nature-culture, human-animal, woman-man, mind-body, work-home?"

On Thursday, November 23, between 15.00-16.00, you are invited to the exhibition tour of Artifact Nature with Nergis Abıyeva.

Constructed Nature Exhibition Tour

Photos from the Exhibition

Living DoorsTaking the moment to understand and make sense of subtle thingsGonca Sezer, who has completed her painting education in Turkey and the USA pursues her diversified artistic production as a long established artist, for nearly 40 years now. The artist initially gained visibility in the art scene through her participations in “young generation” exhibitions. Sezer, who -starting from the end of the 1980s- attended projects depicting the “modernization” period of Turkish paintings, has by the end of the 1990s included, different and new forms of expression (as of the period) such as found objects and photography in her production process. Sezer's practice, is based on stories of Istanbul, the city where she was born and raised. Stories of her family members from Samatya, their family albums and the napkin collection coming from her childhood are elements that form the core of her artistic practices.It is clear that Gonca Sezer`s practice and artistic attitude are shaped around the motives of care, dilligence and the instinct for protection: “I am attentive to the environmental, historical changes that I observe around the city or neighborhood I live in, the identities generated within the human-history-surrounding triangle and the findings these have brought to our present day. Sometimes an object or image, it can be a photograph or a stone, sometimes an iron pattern or an ornament. I take special care to revisit, redig these with the consideration of the present day.” Sezer`s parctices have multiple aspects, many facets. Recently, the artist has been preoccupied with the buildings and doors of Istanbul, and especially the floral patterns on the doors. These “subtle things” becoming the subject matter of her creation, coincides with the time she moves and starts to live in Sisli, Kurtulus. Kurtulus, formerly known as Tatavla, one of the oldest neighborhoods of Istanbul, plays a role in shaping Sezer`s recent practices. The artist, together with the similarities of the plants and flowers, as part of the existing flora of Istanbul (like holy hocks, ladies eardrops, acorns), intends to make visible again and maintain the memory of repeating ornament motives and flowerlike stonecut forms used on doors which she witnesses in her walks every day.Sezer exhibits her installation “Silent Flowers”, one of her recent works, at Barin Han as part of the exhibition “In the Ruins” in 2024. According to Oguz Karayemis, “Silent Flowers” treating ornaments in remnant spaces with the same logic, offers them a new graphical life:”She not only preserves them in the face of oblivion and destruction, but also transforms them within new relations with humans and non human animals, plants, streets and walls, in short with the city.”Nested and CoexistingTimes, media, materials, techniques nested in each other and coexisting with that what is personal and social occupy in Sezer`s work an important place. Utilizing the notion of time relatively and open-endedly, the artist speculatively makes use of the archives. There is no hierarchy of materials in her artistic practice. Although she is a graduate of the Academy, an institution shaped by the tradition of oil on canvas, Sezer is one of the influential artists of a generation striving for change in materials and becoming free. Sezer is interested in everyday materials and found objects developed by feminist art against the centuries of ‘high’ and masculine art-making styles of academic art. Lately she also includes embroidery and fabric in her works as well.In her work “Living Doors” that also lends its name to the exhibition in Quick Art Space and is placed in the center of it, owing to third dimensions like reliefs mounted on fabrics resembling a door, surreal elements are predominant. Laces inherited by Sezer from her mother and aunt, prepared for her dowry, are among the materials of this work. The artist has created floral shapes from these laces which have waited to be found, deep down in a chest for years, never fulfilling their dowry function.In between two and three dimensions, everyday and vital elements have been finely embroidered on a monumental cloth. Thus the blackness giving form to the background, is a result of the artist`s work with fine-tipped pencil strokes as in the work of a miniaturist. This monumental work of fine craftsmanship and processuality is accompanied by sketches made with pencil on paper. In this work, Sezer uses inherited family photographs and door photographs taken by herself, as her references. Photographs of the artist's parents, taken separately by the sea, are addressed together with the flowers of Istanbul.Gonca Sezer's aquarelle on paper paintings in the exhibition, seem to want to attain a new form, a new language by combining nature with abstract forms. Sezer manages to create a deep atmosphere, by utilising the fluidity and transparency of watercolour, adding an organic feeling to the painting with slightly green leaf forms and flower stems or grasses lent from nature. The freedom of the brush strokes awakens a feeling of both calmness and dynamism. The watercolours in which pink, green and brown tones are balanced, bring to mind works categorised as ‘lyrical abstract’ in the history of art. Forms that give the impression of birds or wings, seem to be floating around a flower. The artist creates distinct and dynamic compositions with the abstract interpretation of natural elements. These paintings are the outcomes of a calm but at the same time free understanding of aesthetics, decoding and re-imagining the forms of nature.Finding-ConstructedObjects of findings Gonca Sezer uses in her recent works, have delicately been stripped off from their functions. Embroidery purified of its dowry function and amorphous forms made of iron without any function, which have been produced by a craftsman the artist has found in Kurtulus, show that her practice chooses to follow an object-directional path.Sezer who is interested in the transformation of flowers - a part of the flora of Istanbul- into motifs only then to stylishly take their places on doors, encounters numerous doors while working on the traces of found objects on her own personal life. These doors invoke an urge in the artist for the creation of a new attachment and so emerge her works where iron and ceramics are used together. Home things in a home, living experiences and the connections between these, show us the creation process of the appliques. Leaves, the nature of the city, its stylised images... The patterns, flowers and leaves on the doors, thus permeate her works. The togetherness of the organic and inorganic are standout features of her recent creations. An organic plant like acorn, which is mostly planted as a prevention precaution from erosion, meets iron and ceramicsin the artist´s works.Sezer who never returns from her walks or bike rides empty handedly, says “The subjects I am interested in, come to me within life.” 4 The umbilical cord is established spontaneously with each new project she works on, reads or sketches. In her previous exhibition “A matter of Tail” the artist establishes a relation between animals facing danger of extinction and the notebook of her aunt, Firdevs Tarimtay who married after dropping out of school. In this work she also traces back her aunt`s life -a life crowned by marriage-, Firdevs who instead of going to high school adopts the name “Hayriye” and starts to work in a fashion house. Sezer in a way, is almost a mediator of these stories and life experiences into which she is born into or finds herself in.As an artist born in Istanbul, back then a city around 2 million inhabitants, Gonca Sezer`s works implicitly confront us with issues like settlement, unsettlement, forced displacement in a city that has reached tenfold of its population now. A city continously subject to radical changes day after day. Displacement is not something only humans are subject to, plants and animals have been displaced throughout history as well. To be rooted in the universe of human-flora and fauna, to be grounded, coming from the soil and returning to it, fragility, vulnerability, these are thoughts that rush to my mind looking at Sezer`s works. Gonca Sezer`s artistic practice is inherently showing care rather than nostalgia, taking its moment to stop and appreciate subtle things.</div>

You are invited to the exhibition 'The Door That Opens in Life'

Photos from the Workshop

The Door That Opens in Life

Wandering Through the Kiosk of Kismet“We read because books give us a unique pleasure, one that films, television, etc. cannot provide. Books offer us certain freedoms: while reading, we are free to be mentally active; we participate fully in the creation (the imagining) of a narrative.”1As an endless source of Turkish literature, the writing of Bilge Karasu was also a reference point for Quick Art Space’s first group exhibition, “Constructed Nature”. Taking its departure from Karasu’s words on “real or fictional images,” his bookKısmet Büfesibrings together texts that rely on visual qualities and proposes a narrative oscillating between the visual and the intellectual. With this exhibition, we wanted to construct a curatorial framework reminiscent of the winding paths in Karasu’s texts.How much control do artists hold in the process of production? At what point do they leave things to uncertainty, coincidence, or “kismet”? The exhibition “Wandering Through the Kiosk of Kismet” focuses on various moments of the creative process—from the ways artists relate to materials, to intellectual directions and intuitive decisions—on the dynamics that determine the final form of the work. It seeks to draw attention to a creation process that wanders the boundary between conscious choice and the unexpected. The works in the exhibition pursue what is left unsaid, what finds expression visually, and meanings that expand through the power of association. “Wandering Through the Kiosk of Kismet” proposes a route with diverse stops: a route searching for multiple ways of relating to time, space, memory, identity, and gaze.Çınar Eslek, in her single-piece work “Response to the Apocalypse”, transforms the memory of fabric found on the street and attributes to it a kind of “body.” The accompanying poem serves as the soul, memory, or inner voice inscribed into this body. “Seven legs” evoke non-normative existences; the “vulva” recalls both the beginning and the wound, as well as the cycle lingering at the threshold between apocalypse and rebirth. The stitches hold together not only the fabric but also the narrative and the body. Thus, the viewer bears witness at once to a body and its story, to a text and a surface.In “The Gift”, Seda Oturmak starts from the idea that gender distinctions are convenient for a male-dominated world. She satirizes the rewarding of boys after circumcision ceremonies. In her paintings, Oturmak deliberately employs a certain nostalgic mise-en-scène, specifically choosing details belonging to the lower-middle socio-economic class. In an ornate circumcision room, the boys are depicted together with the adventurous, competitive, fearless, enterprising, and entertainment-oriented toys gifted to them, as well as with an adult man. The man holding one of the boys on his lap refers to the possibility of toys becoming instruments of exploitation.Kerem Giriş, in “Köpek Yalasa Doyar” (a phrase Turkish mothers say to children who got dirty playing outside), visualizes play as a childhood space of free contamination. The basket, once a sign of neighborhood sociality and solidarity in everyday life, has over time been replaced by couriers, gated communities, and sterile spaces. With the mirror and the inscription “köpek yalasa doyar” (the literal translation: a dog would get full just by licking), the viewer is invited into a class-based questioning. The basket hanging in the gallery space summons the dust and noise of the neighborhood. Thus, without lapsing into nostalgia, the work oscillates between past and present, clean and dirty, play and discipline, noise and silence.The kinetic installation “Laleli Belkıs İçeriye Gir Kız” (a Turkish rhyme that children chant while playing jump rope) transforms the joyful childhood game of skipping rope into a mechanical, humanless mechanism, evoking both memory and a game culture lost over time. The rope, turning tirelessly and endlessly by a motor, no longer represents the game but its absence. The persistent loop has taken the place of children waiting their turn to step inside. As the movement continues, what spreads through the space is no longer play itself but the trace left by the lack of play.“Amber of the Sun”, the first chapter of Yekaterina Grygorenko’s project “Remnants of a Timeless World”, is nourished by dreams, the collective unconscious, and post-human thought. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s approach to speculative fabulation, it opens a space of imagination where past, future, and never-lived possibilities intertwine. Amber sun is the fossil remnant of a history that never existed; rather than fixing time, it fragments it, bringing memory to light. The motion inscribed in the hybrid body’s torso questions the reduction of life to mere biological vitality, implying that the true source of existence lies in remembering, leaving traces, and intensifying within memory. The boundaries between organic and technological, living and non-living, human and non-human become permeable and interwoven.In her site-specific installation for Quick Art Space, Şafak Şule Kemancı makes visible both her personal relationship with materials and the interaction among those materials. On her first visit to Quick Tower, Kemancı was struck by the large glass facades of the space and worked with a gauzy fabric that created a permeable perception between interior and exterior. On this fabric, she formed an organic shape resembling an orchid at first glance. The vegetal forms that have become the artist’s signature reappear in this work as well—familiar yet open to surprise; with its nature-like but not fully definable structure, it invites the viewer to rethink the boundaries of form.In her installation “Cynara”, Cansu Sönmez examines the multilayered history of Bayrampaşa, where she spent her childhood and adolescence, through the axis of the artichoke plant. The work is based on a multilayered methodology of “performative research,” encompassing field studies, historical archive scans, gastronomy and mythology studies, and AI productions. Hybrid forms made of bronze, polyester, ceramic, 3D printing, and upcycled materials situate themselves between organic, architectural, and cyborg aesthetics, making visible the permeability between utopia and dystopia. Through its speculative narrative extending from the past to a futuristic “green island,” “Cynara” reveals the socio-political processes shaping spatial perception. At the same time, it is an installation that invites us to think together about the possible futures of ecosystems.Nergis Abıyeva, Erenköy, 2025.<div style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;line-height:1.6;font-size:12px;font-style:italic"><ol style="list-style:none;padding-left:0"><li>1Peter Mendelsund,Okurken Ne Görürüz?, 2016, Metis Publishing, s. 210.</li></ol></div>

You are invited to the exhibition “Wandering Through the Buffet of Destiny“

Event