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<article><h2>Constructed Nature</h2><blockquote>The landscapes we build, whether real (our gardens) or fictional (our dreams), follow the same path as our word play.1</blockquote>I have curated the first exhibition at Quick Art Space based on the architectural features of the building and the way it positions itself. When I first visited Quick Tower in April this year, I was impressed by the building as well as how it relates to its surroundings. Dogs using the revolving door that opens to the lobby with huge windows, the lush, vibrant trees around the building, crows perched on trees, cats sleeping inside, all these show that this is also a living space for non-human creatures. The appealing, embracing atmosphere of Quick Tower, designed by Gerhard Feldmeyer, a Vienna-based architect, located in the heart of Kozyatağı, where thousands of visitors spend time or pass by on a daily basis, immediately convinced me that I could make “unexpected exhibitions” beyond the white cube experience.What made me think this place was a “natural” living space as it had actually been transformed, planted, and afforested? Is it only old-growth forests or vast seas that serve nature? Or, if properly intervened and healed by human hands, could urban areas also be capable of strengthening our relationship with nature? How far can we move beyond the binary oppositions such as nature vs. culture, human vs. animal, male vs. female, mind vs. body, work vs. home?The rise of modern cities where space is defined, categorized and parceled out led to the invention of the notions of landscape and scenery. Construct refers to things created with imagination. This word, as well as its implications, drew my attention while reading Bilge Karasu’s book Ne Kedisiz Ne Kitapsız [Neither Bookless nor Catless]. In his article titled “The Novel Still Ranks First in Image Production”, Karasu says the following.<blockquote>I presume that our life is comprised of a continuous production of artifacts. We are constantly living in a construct, or what we experience (as an important or unimportant, heavy or light, strong or faint element) constitutes the construct we call our life. The elements of this larger construct are more limited, smaller artifacts. Roughly speaking, do I argue that there is no such thing as “reality”? Not at all. I mean that we perceive, comprehend, make sense of, think about, understand what is called “reality” only with the help, mediation, and “creation” of certain constructs. I call these constructs images.2</blockquote>Constructed Nature is, in a sense, a continuation of Mental Imagery of Things not Actually Present, a group show that Uras Kızıl and I curated at Summart in 2021. As a matter of fact, Özlem Şahinler’s work titled “I am You” organically connects the two exhibitions. In this work, she considers her hair a micro-ecosystem and a hosting space where multiple interdependent species stray as inhabitants, and she reveals different forms of existence of a living system from her hair strands. Thus she emphasizes that what we think of as “me” is actually “us”. These beings in unique forms try to breathe in an anonymous geography with their identities that harbor a common essence. This work imagines the transformative process of various living anatomies “that have existed from a single essence again becoming a single essence” and reminds us that the changing and transforming living beings do constitute a whole.We also have six paintings from Nazan Azeri’s “Forgotten Time and Now” series in the exhibition, the first examples of which she started in Ayvalık in the summer of 2021. Painted with blue and red acrylic ink on handmade paper, this series can be read as a rebellion against the nature culture dichotomy. Questioning the systems that reproduce inequality built on the binary opposition between culture (masculine) and nature (feminine), the blue color in Azeri’s paintings references the Far East, Anatolia, the Topkapı Palace Circumcision Room tiles, and the ancient paintings of Egypt. Azeri adopts a “killjoy” style, reconsidering the symbolic meanings of blue and red in works from the history of art. Her “Forgotten Time and Now” series brings to mind Yves Klein’s use of naked women as human paintbrushes in his patented Klein blue or Leonardo da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man” drawing, which puts the adult male human in the centre of the world. Azeri’s series is a silent feminist response to the canon of art history made/written by male artists.Gülçin Aksoy, as an artist who frequently uses the idiom “constructed nature”, has produced a new work titled “Reticulus volvulus” for the exhibition. According to Aksoy, a work of art is an artifact. More precisely, based on the distinction between human and nature, it is what is added to nature, which is deemed “unnatural” —that is, produced by humans. This discourse speaks outside the human vs. nature distinction, and the work of art or the human being exists as a part of this world and universe. In this case, we can understand our “doings” as natures added to that nature. Therefore, Aksoy is interested in human-made natures: What looks like a representation of a tree is a tree in the common imagination, but it is not a tree we can sit under. So is the image of a woven tree. Ergo, producing, distributing, pixelating such a tree is not an act outside the nature. As a pun she has invented, “Reticulus volvulus” refers to Latin medical terms. Produced with “natural materials”, this diptych work, one woven and the other stacked on top of each other, points to a world transformed by culture using the written signs depicting the human condition, which we have separated from nature for thousands of years, although itself transformed. Things that are written, drawn, crumpled up… They are transformed by communing with paper. The threads become entangled with each other. They seem to be involved in a complicated but attractive world.Seçil Büyükkan’s work, produced as part of “Roots Far from the Ground” series, first exhibited at the Atatürk Cultural Centre, is separated from the soil as the source of life, standing alone in a gigantic way. Standing vertically before us like a large and lofty cathedral, this work has already taken its place in our printing history as a work that Büyükkan made with linoleum moulds single-handedly, thus pushing the limits of printing techniques. In dialogue with both the trees around Quick Tower and Gülçin Aksoy’s work, “Roots Far from the Ground” makes us think that the concepts of reality and imagination are intertwined and the question of “pictorial representation” remains.Ekin Saçlıoğlu’s “Childhood”, previously shown at ArtSümer’s Fragmented exhibition, is another sculpture/work that reinforces the show, which she created by transforming the wooden skeleton of the sofa she spent her entire childhood on. Saçlıoğlu started sculpting furniture during the pandemic, based on the idea that while spending time at home, we mesh with inanimate objects in our homes and become a part of each other. The colorful pieces that make linear movements on the wooden skeleton belong to the roots of tamarisk trees that hit the Palamutbükü beach in Datça with the lodos. She places the waste styrofoam green form on the skeleton without any intervention. This work, which brings to mind a panoramic view with the upper part of the sofa as the horizon line and the entire work as the sky and the sea, returns to the Kozyatağı neighborhood where Saçlıoğlu spent her childhood on the occasion of Constructed Nature. When we look at a landscape, do we interpret it solely through what we see, or is it a “thing” that is influenced by our memory or autobiographical narratives?Ahmet Rüstem Ekici and Hakan Sorar’s “Theatrum Mundi”, a triptych video installation, is inspired by the idea that the world is a stage. This interactive experience is presented on three screens with introduction, body and conclusion stages, making the viewer a part of the experience, transforming them into an “experiencer”. This scene is designed not to be limited to a single angle or perspective, instead offering the experiencer the opportunity to observe the landscape from their own preferred angles, to change the sound, color and weather conditions. This experience encourages reflection on the mechanisms of control and the limits of personal freedom. On this artificial stage, where the distinction between the virtual and natural world is blurred, the viewer takes on the roles of a director, set designer and gaffer, focusing on urban and bodily traces in environmental relationships. The experiencer is entitled to shape the landscape with more than twenty control buttons and variations on the panel. This work provides the experiencer with multiple perspectives by allowing them to question the environmental relations of nature, destruction and the body. “Theatrum Mundi” creates a scene that is not limited to a single perspective thanks to the capability to manage the flow of the work with control buttons. On the other hand, it questions the nature of the image and the centre.All of the artists who contributed to the Constructed Nature visited Quick Tower. We had tea and coffee with some of them in the lobby, some under the shading trees. We took a walking tour with some of them in the greens of Fatih Sultan Mehmet Hospital and petted cats. And with others, we sat in the square, sharing silence, watching the cats and dogs frequenting the building. I am sure that Constructed Nature, created with seven artists who adopt different languages in art-making, has also been shaped by the unique banalities of our daily lives that we experienced together.Nergis AbıyevaOctober 2023, ErenköyTranslated by Zeynep Nur Ayanoğlu1Anne Cauquelin,<cite>Peyzajın İcadı</cite>, Dost Publishing, p. 78.2Bilge Karasu,<cite>Ne Kitapsız ne Kedisiz</cite>, Metis Publishing, p. 17.</article>

Initiated by Maher Holding, Quick Art Space, located within Quick Tower, started its activities in May 2023 and the first exhibition curated by the founding director Nergis Abıyeva will take place from October 28 to December 1, 2023.

Press Release

Promotion Poster

Constructed Nature

Photos from the Exhibition

Palas Pandıras [Helter-Skelter]: A Decade of Desen Halıçınarlı’s WorkThe city we live in changes and transforms every day. Encircled by excavation trucks and veiled in dust clouds, the view from our windows—whether from above or below, inside or out—shifts constantly. Istanbul’s urban fabric seems to be in perpetual metamorphosis, shedding its skin repeatedly. Amid endless gentrification, we barely recognize our own streets. For many of us, even the notion of calling a place “home” has become tenuous, if not impossible. Desen Halıçınarlı, an artist whose work has long been intertwined with the city, delves into Istanbul’s urban imagery and its ceaseless flux. After attending a fine arts high school in Izmir, she moved to Istanbul in 2001 to study painting at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University. Captivated by the historic fabric of the city, she began to depict centuries-old buildings in neighbourhoods like Beyoğlu, Galata, and Karaköy in her paintings and engravings. The urban landscape she saw when looking out of her window or up at the sky has shaped her practice since the early 2000s, evolving alongside Istanbul’s own transformation.In his book&nbsp;The Image of the City, urban planner Kevin Lynch argues that the city offers more than the eye can see or the ear can hear. Many of its hidden scenes and forgotten corners, he notes, cannot be experienced spontaneously. Similarly, Joachim Sartorius, a diplomat and poet enamoured with Istanbul, describes İstanbul as the city most rich in memories—and most adept at forgetting within all cities:Here, one can learn much about the art of remembering and forgetting. I’m not just referring to Antiquity and the graceful decay of it, Byzantium, the fractured New Rome, or the imamah-shaped gravestones that have now acquired an artistic beauty. I feel this even more strongly in the “younger” neighbourhoods, like Beyoğlu, on the Pera side, Istanbul’s cosmopolitan, multilingual quarter in the 1930s and 40s. Beyoğlu, with its decline from its former glory, its caryatids bear the weight of their decay, and apartment entrances with Greek, Arabic and French inscriptions, remains my favourite district.This “graceful decay” of memory spaces plays a prominent role in Halıçınarlı’s work. Exploring the city on foot, much like a modern-day “flâneuse”, she stumbled upon places such as the Terra Santa Spanish Hospital an Chapel, guided by a caretaker; the Beyoğlu Municipality building, a site of political conflict throughout its history; and the Nimet Han building near the French Passage in Karaköy, where her studio was located between 2011 and 2022. Learning from a Belarusian tourist who accidentally climbed onto the roof that her studio had once been a monk’s room, Halıçınarlı felt herself immersed in a surreal and mystical landscape. Four onion-domed Russian churches that attract the gaze from the roofs of various buildings become the subject of Halıçınarlı’s research and appear in her paintings.&nbsp;Urban planner and writer Kevin Lynch suggests that living in a city is, in essence, living within an image—a notion we often overlook:Streets, boulevards, historic buildings, and grand bridges of that city coalesce into a singular impression. Moreover the perception of a city shifts over time and from person to person. Probably the only thing that can be argued to be the same are the questions that come to mind: What does the structure of a bustling city truly signify? The image we have of the city we live in is the product of which sensitivity? Is it possible to lose oneself in the same place twice? Can a city’s history parallel our personal history?How, then, do we gaze upon the city? Are we looking outward from within, casting our eyes from the safety of home to the building across the street? In fact, the direction of the gaze may vary from city to city and even from neighbourhood to neighbourhood; especially when walking in the old districts of Istanbul, we sometimes feel the need to look up. In Halıçınarlı’s work, the act of looking is plural and multifaceted. Her art urges us to look upward, to peek into hidden corners, to remain open to the subtleties and serendipities of the urban fabric.The exhibition “Palas Pandıras” features oil paintings on canvas, engravings, and even the printing plates left behind from the engraving process. For Halıçınarlı, who studied both painting and engraving simultaneously at Mimar Sinan University, carving and engraving are rooted in relief-like actions. From the beginning of her practice, she has worked in a “two-and-a-half-dimensional” space between two- and three-dimension where engraving played a pivotal role in shaping her three-dimensional thinking. Since 2017, she has focused on reshaping discarded objects—items she describes as “not trash, but abandoned by their owners, treated as if they were trash.” One of the most striking examples is her&nbsp;Kent Çöpleri[“Urban Debris”] series, initiated with a three-dimensional installation created from the old electrical fuse box of Nimet Han. This piece, now included in the exhibition, makes its debut with this show.During the pandemic, Halıçınarlı began her “Yuvam neresi” [“Where Is My Home”] series, inspired by the “dodecahedron”—a twelve-faced geometric form with equal pentagonal sides. To the artist, these geometric forms suggest that a home is more than just a physical space; it is an intricate layering of thoughts, memories, and emotions. Her paintings often feature winged creatures like storks and roosters, which she explains as follows: “Birds exist between two worlds, both in the sky and on the ground. They fly and they perch. I think that’s why I include them in my paintings.”Two paintings in the exhibition,&nbsp;Heterotopya&nbsp;[“Heterotopia”]Iand&nbsp;Heterotopya II, borrow their title from Michel Foucault’s concept of “heterotopia.” Created over a year (2017–2018), these works traverse multiple spaces and times, hovering between the real and the imagined. In her paintings&nbsp;Heterotopia Iand&nbsp;Heterotopia II, there is a spatial, hybrid and heterogeneous construction that relates to the concept of heterotopia. Halıçınarlı’s layered compositions capture the boundaries of power that emerge from the physical, topographical, and social norms of the city. These boundaries are not sharply demarcated, but are organic and chaotic. While her works offer aerial views of the Bosphorus, the urban grid does not align with reality. Even if the buildings or events are not in their right places on the map, we can feel some of the events that the city has witnessed. Halıçınarlı’s signature use of electric wires weaves these elements together, connecting homes and themes.The exhibition “Palas Pandıras” is an invitation to examine the transformation of Halıçınarlı’s practice, the path she has travelled and what she has added to her production, and at the same time a call to look at the city we live in with more observant eyes.&nbsp;Nergis AbıyevaTranslation: Oğuz Karayemişyarn<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>1Kevin Lynch,Kent İmgesi, İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, p. 1.</li><li>2Joachim Sartorius, “Gözlerin Dinlendiği Yer ya da İstanbul’dan İlk İzlenimlerin Etkin Bir Sıralaması”, October 1992, İstanbul / January 1993, Berlin, translated by Sezer Duru, Maçka Art Gallery archive.</li><li>3In September 2022, when Uras and I visited her loft studio in Nimet Han, we better understood the obvious and indirect relationships between Desen’s landscapes and her works.</li><li>4The artist, who worked and lived around Beyoğlu when she first moved to Istanbul, is aware that she is gradually being pushed out of the city along with her fellow artists. Like many other artists displaced by rent and speculation in the real estate market, Halıçınarlı was forced to move from her studio where she worked between 2011 and 2022, and has been working in her studio in Kadıköy Yeldeğirmeni since 2022.</li><li>5Lynch,Kent İmgesi.</li><li>6We met Desen during the engraving class he gave to the students of the engineering department in ITU’s monumental Taşkışla building. On 1 June 2022, while her students were printing their engravings for their final assignment, I was among them as an observer at Desen’s invitation.</li></ol></div>

It is taking place between January 10th and April 1st under the curatorship of Nergis Abıyeva.

Helter-Skelter

<h2>Organizing Photography with a Non-Representational Gaze</h2>Kaan Kemal Öner’s exhibition In/Through the Belly of the Sky is based on his processual photographs taken across different places such as Cambodia, Thailand, Iceland, South Africa, Normandy and Mazı Village in Turkey. Persistence, repetition and endless experimentation are inherent in Öner’s artistic practice. His works are based not only on conveying the image, but also on apperceiving and implementing the processual character of the act of making. In his exhibition In/Through the Belly of the Sky, a selection of Öner’s seven-year production has been site-specifically produced at Quick Art Space.Using printing techniques such as Kallitype, Cyanotype, Vandyke, Platinum Palladium, Silver Gelatin, Gumoil, Mordançage as part of the act of making photographs, Öner’s photographs bear the traces of chemical reactions, errors, various environmental effects such as wind and dust rather than the digitally provided perfect image. The photographs, subjected to distortions and various interventions, are sometimes based on Öner’s drawings on them, sometimes his overlapping and/or appropriation of the found photographs, and other times, non-human matter is given space to reveal its own potential.The fact that all these techniques date back to the nineteenth century reminds us of the historicity of photography by creating networks that connect the past to the present. The state of re-sensation revealed through these networks inevitably arouses uncanny, ambiguous and vague feelings. This situation bears similarity to the transcendental expression that nineteenth-century Romanticism tried to reveal with its sublime insight. The elements of nature that evoke in the viewer feelings of fear and awe due to their dimensions...The act of keeping records is realized through the involvement of a non-representational gaze. The gaze has existed since the beginning of the history of photography. So what is meant by the non-representational gaze? There is an act of (re)seeing here, inherent in posthuman epistemology. A gaze that adds the concept to the process and is capable of making visible the relations between the human and non-human. Then what does it mean to involve the non-human in the practice of photography? Does including non-humans in the process consist of visualizing them as images per se? Although making animals, plants, objects, organics and inorganics visible in the image has an important place in posthuman thought, the act of making photographs is also a part of the articulation in question.Like his contemporaries who deal with photography conceptually, Öner prefers to depart from the (passive) position of taking the photograph towards the (active) position of making it. A return to the primals of photography by adding layers of matter to the process may be possible with the reuse of old techniques. Of course, the reuse of old techniques cannot be the sole element sought in a non-representational gaze. However, the artist’s manipulation of the chemical processes related to the primals of photography is an important step towards giving photography an organic integrity. In this way, the artist’s gesture becomes palpable. Photography thus begins to assume a position that mobilizes different emotions. While the relationship between the artist and the work requires the artist to master the knowledge and technique of the material, such mastery also prevents the artist’s alienation from his work.This type of a “comeback” is an integral part of Öner’s art practice. The materials and techniques he uses emerge as the act of photograph-making and lead to the re-sensation of the artist’s gesture. It is undeniable that what photography is today is more than a linear “progress”, but rather a retrogression. However, such retrogressions do not mean excluding digital possibilities at large, they can only be achieved by re-establishing the balance between the digital and the non-digital. In this way, a better ethical-ontological-epistemological approach can be achieved in which one does not exclude the other. This is why the exhibition In/Through the Belly of the Sky includes works produced with old techniques as well as digital and video.The technical recall in the exhibition also applies to the reception of landscape painting. Öner’s imagery inherent in landscape painting presents unmanned views, reminiscent of the landscape paintings of Romanticism. In the landscape views with no human beings in sight, elements of nature stand out that sometimes outperform human beings in scale. When the size of mountains, stones, rocks and trees are compared to humans, they create a contrast in terms of scale. The indistinct, small human silhouettes that emerge as a conscious choice of scaling remind us of the landscapes of the Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich. The color palette, revealed by the reinterpretation of old techniques, also accompanies this non-linear historic rupture. Deconstructed images of cathedrals, pixelated shrines, temples and the color fields of all these images...Large-scale images of nature, which we can describe as mathematical sublime, continue in the columns of the space. With the effect of both scaling and the angle taken, trees, branches and stones cause changes in the viewer’s vision. This change is related to the fact that non-human forms become increasingly embodied. These images make the viewer feel the presence of human in an unmanned nature.The addition of the non-representational gaze and theory in the process depends on the expansion and/or visibility of what makes photography an art object (layers of matter). With In/Through the Belly of the Sky, Kaan Kemal Öner presents a trace of the conceptual process that involves the restructuring of photography today.Uras KızılTranslation: Zeynep Nur Ayanoğlu

Kaan Kemal Öner's first solo exhibition titled In/Through the Belly of the Sky takes place at Quick Art Space between 11 May-28 June, curated by Uras Kızıl.

In/Through the Belly of the Sky

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“

The Door That Opens in Life

The Balance of WisdomThe balance of wisdom, which I first encountered at the Sharjah Museum of Islamic Civilisations, is one of the most complex hydrostatic balances ever designed and manufactured in the medieval Islamic world. The balance, a detailed description of which was provided by Abdurrahman Al-Khazini (11th-12th century) in his book Kitâbü Mîzâni’’l-hikme [“The Book of the Balance of Wisdom”], was used to determine the value of precious metals and gems. Al-Khazini’s balance was not only capable of making different types of measurements, but also vastly superior to all other balances of its period in terms of precision. According to contemporary sources, the accuracy of the balance of wisdom was remarkable. As Al-Khazini suggested, repetition is essential to obtain better results.For me, the balance of wisdom serves as a metaphor for the “wisdom” and balance we apply to our judgement in various situations. This metaphor symbolises our ability to balance our evaluations and decisions based on knowledge, experience, intuition and ethical values. The Balance of Wisdomexhibition focuses on the balancing processes that involve hesitation, repetition, questioning and weighing. It questions the ties, relations, boundaries and balancing processes between domestic and professional life. The exhibition focuses on issues such as the often invisible nature of domestic labour, caring for oneself and others, balancing between giving and receiving, and the reciprocity.One of the inspirations for the exhibition is Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ Manifesto For Maintenance Art 1969!Ukeles typed this three-and-a-half-page manifesto in 1969, at the peak of second wave feminism. At the time she wrote this manifesto, which was actually an exhibition proposal, Ukeles, who was, in her own words, a “full-time mother”, dedicating all her time and energy to motherhood, was thinking of transforming the tension between her identity as an artist and her identity as a mother into an art performance. “I am an artist. I am a woman. I am a wife. I am a mother (random order). I do a lot of washing, cleaning, cooking, renewing, supporting, preserving, etc. Also, (up to now separately) I ‘do’ art. Now I will simply do these maintenance everyday things, and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them, as Art.”Ukeles discusses a dual system, which she calls “development” and “maintenance.” For Ukeles, “development” symbolises a pure individual creation, the new, the change, and the struggle, which are usually identified with the avant-garde and the masculine. Maintenance, on the other hand, refers to “dusting off” pure individual creation, protecting the new, perpetuating change - roles mostly attributed to women within intimate spaces: Clean your desk - Wash the dishes - Clean the floor - Wash your clothes - Wash your toes - Change the baby’s diaper - Finish the report - Correct the typos - Mend the fence - Keep the customer happy - Throw out the stinky rubbish - Watch out don’t put things in your nose - What shall I wear? - I have no socks - Pay your bills - Don’t litter - Save string - Wash your hair - Change the sheets - Go to the store - I’m out of perfume - Say it again—He doesn’t understand - Seal it again—it leaks - Go to work - This art is dusty - Clear the table - Call him again - Flush the toilet - Stay young By “pure individual creation”, Ukeles is clearly referring to the artistic genius, a notion that has historically been attributed to men. The artist’s exhibition proposal, titled “Care,” consists of three phases: Personal care, general care, and care for the earth. In the personal care section, Ukeles proposes to move into the museum and do the daily chores she used to do at home, this time as “public art activities.” These daily chores include sweeping and polishing the floor, dusting, wiping the walls, cooking and entertaining guests.Ukeles’ intention is to draw attention to the processes of care, to give them the value they deserve; to make unpaid, invisible labour visible; and even to elevate these processes to the status of art. The most pivotal part of her manifesto is the statement “everything I do as art is art, everything I say is art is art.” The second phase of the exhibition consists of interviews with labourers from various fields of work (cleaning worker, garbage collector, construction worker, librarian, physician, museum manager, bank manager, etc.) about their relations with care. Finally, in the section devoted to the care for the earth, Ukeles plans to bring waste to the museum and repurpose it by processing it. The artist will produce all her future works under the guidance of this manifesto.As Ukeles draws attention with her iconic work, we live in a world where care and care work - especially in the context of domestic labour - have been devalued for centuries. During the pandemic, we faced a very serious care crisis. The Care Collective , in their book titled Bakım Manifestosu: Karşılıklı Bağımlılık Politikası[“The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence”] illuminates the dilemmas of this crisis. By exposing the inequality-producing care policies that became evident during the pandemic, they envisage a care policy by which people can access care more fairly. Underlining that invisible, devalued and exploited care labour is everywhere, they argue that care must be reclassified out of the category of non-productive labour. They draw attention to neoliberalism’s insistence on prioritizing care solely for oneself and immediate family. For a more just world, it is essential to re-imagine the limits of family care, to include wider and multiple kinship models, and to call for a collective and communal life.Above are the sources of inspiration, the points of departure, and thought bubbles of The Balance of Wisdomexhibition. I invited artists whose work I believe resonates with the concept of care. The works of Alp İşmen, Başak Kaptan, Beyza Boynudelik, Çiğdem Menteşoğlu, Damla Sari, Merve Zeybek, Selin Göksel, Züleyha Altıntaş establish a dialogue with different aspects of the exhibition.Alp İşmen’s charcoal work on paper, titled Şükran [“Blessing”], centers around an object left to him by his mother. İşmen, who sleeps on the pillow once used by his mother, with whom he internalised the same air, water and life for years in the same house, transforms into an artwork, in his own words, “that pillow, which witnessed her journey to the beyond, where her final years were sealed with a last breath, where he felt the dream of her head flying on her pillow, the memory of her dream, the affection he remembered and her absence in the palm of his hand.” The painting brings to mind the circularity of caring processes, the shifting of the child-parent and parent-child relationship over time, and reminds us that being able to say goodbye to life on one’s own bed and pillow is not a privilege but a right to life/death that every human being deserves.The works of Başak Kaptan, whose object-oriented practice is evident in her works constructed between digital and analogue media, can be seen as the outputs of her co-production processes with her daughter Adel. In the video installation titled Elleri Bulut [ “Her Hands are Clouds ], a bicoloured Sümerbank sheet, which Kaptan remembers from her childhood, referring to a specific period and holding a place in the collective memory, flutters. We see Adel, a six-year-old child, playing with this sheet, unfamiliar to her, falling down and getting up again. Another work is based on Adel's process of learning to read and write during the pandemic. Kaptan traces and reproduces one of Adel's first attempts at writing the letter A, which she wrote by projecting it on the screen during the distance education process, and prints its colourless relief on engraving paper. By including photocopies of both the original and the projected version of the photograph of Adel’s right hand, which she used while writing, into the composition, she emphasises the letter A, whose shape remains intact through the projection technique used in calligraphy.Çiğdem Menteşoğlu’s paintings, based on her personal experiences, deal with emotions and concepts such as body, fertility, waiting, alienation, love, care, protection. Menteşoğlu’s series Pregnant Paus e, a title derived from the English phrase for the state of being pregnant, refers to a productive pause and silence that heralds the arrival of something new, surprising and exciting. Believing that pregnancy is not solely a biological process, the artist alludes to the pregnancy-like processes that must be experienced before the artwork emerges. Menteşoğlu’s series, which evokes dreams in various states and contains surreal elements, focuses on the process, the inner, and the new being/existence that grows and develops within. It opens up for discussion the connection between the female experience of pregnancy and the creative processes attributed to artists.Beyza Boynudelik's work titled İç Ses/Fasulye[“Inner Voice/Bean”] is a video about the domestic life of a professional artist, a woman who lives her life as an artist. As she goes about her daily household chores, the long-held sentences that the artist has been mulling over and over in her head, about the art scene and her future in particular, are transformed into this video work. During the filming, she improvises an internal conversation without preparing any text. While shelling beans in the video, she also questions the systems that produce inequality through examples such as Guerilla Girls from art history. Throughout the work, issues such as the unquestioned acceptance of the freedom granted to men and the challenge of women trying to produce art along with other tasks attributed to them, come to the fore. In the video, only the artist’s hands, busy shelling beans, are visible. Here, the “artist's hand” is not a metaphor for genius and talent, but a tool that handles vital and everyday tasks.Damla Sari participated in the exhibition as an artist who cares for outdated objects. Her kinetic installation titled Havadan Sudan[“The Trivial”]is made with the velvet used in the photographic work Hediye Paketi Olsun mu? [“Giftwrapping?”]. It resembles a living landscape, but it is actually lifeless. The image of water piled on it in an immortalised moment of death, halts the time and movement of the artist. When she thinks about the stopping of time, the artist asks herself:(How could the time of water stop?) and thinks that time cannot dominate water. She gathers the links between water, time and death in a single spot, and piles on.Merve Zeybek’s work titled Bilgelik Terazisi [“The Balance of Wisdom”] was specially produced for the exhibition. According to Merve Zeybek, all universal acts, whether artistic or not, are positioned in a place beyond representation. Because none of them represent anything, they all embody the repetition of the universe. The aim is not to represent something but to reach into its knowledge. Since everything comes into being from nothingness and the absence of nothingness, or because being emerges in nothingness, this knowledge leads to a high vibration as soon as it is attained, and this vibration is realised precisely thanks to nothingness/voidness/voidness/adam/ghayb. The rectangular areas in Bilgelik Terazisi representing the beginning, the development and the end in the work are an adventure, and at the same time a return to the essence in time, a form of disappearance and meeting the eye alongside a return to the essence. In being, there are possibilities utilized by non-being. This is an opportunity to find oneself on the path to nothingness on the balance of science.At first glance, Selin Göksel’s work titledÇocuk da Yaparım Kariyer de[“I Make a Child and a Career”]depicts a female figure who is ironing while taking care of the baby in her arms. When viewed more carefully, the figure is actually ironing herself. The mother, who goes back and forth between her home life, baby care and career, while not neglecting her child, tries to conform to the criteria of society. As the wrinkles are flattened by ironing, the figure sometimes hides who she really is, her tastes and dreams. Apart from the act of ironing, the iron in this installation represents the artist’s father, who spent years in the production of ironing thermostats for years. Göksel, who has always felt protected and cared for by her father and learned how to produce solutions to technical matters from him, symbolises through the iron that her father, who is no longer in the world, continues to silently accompany her .Züleyha Altıntaş’s work titled Görünmeyen Emek [“Invisible Labour”], produced exclusively for the exhibition, is a transparent, complex and nebulous “form.” Görünmeyen Emek establishes a therapeutic analogy between the state of being alone with oneself that provided by handcraft, its healing, restorative effect, and melancholy. Coming from the sculpture tradition, the artist uses crochet with rhythmic and repetitive movements to present both mental and bodily experience as a gigantic form. In the triptych accompanying this “sculptural” form, which looks transparent, delicate and fragile rather than sculpture in the classical sense, and which is exhibited together with the embroidery frame, the artist has a non-artist man dictate the now-iconic questions of feminist art: “Why are there no great women artists? Do women have to undress to enter the Metropolitan Museum? What if women ruled the world?” With Altıntaş’s work, the discipline of classical sculpture, traditionally representing permanence and immortality in the history of art, and often associated with a “masculine” obsession with bodily power, turns into a field of questioning.&nbsp;Nergis AbıyevaTranslation: Oğuz Karayemiş<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>1Yousef Rassi-Reza Yassi,Al-Khazini’s Balance of Wisdom: A Masterpiece of Medieval Engineering,Nuncies, 36, 2021, p. 60.</li><li>2Mierle Laderman Ukeles,Manifesto For Maintenance Art 1969!, 1969,<a href="https://queensmuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Ukeles-Manifesto-for-Maintenance-Art-1969.pdf" target="_blank">https://queensmuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Ukeles-Manifesto-for-Maintenance-Art-1969.pdf</a>.</li><li>3Gülnur Acar Savran, who translated theManifesto for Maintenance, emphasizes that the word “care” in Turkish encompasses meanings beyond just maintenance, such as attention, affection, compassion, concern, and oversight. Therefore, she believes it is not possible to translate it into Turkish with a single word. Throughout the book, it is sometimes addressed as “maintenance and oversight.” In my opinion, the word that best translates “care” into Turkish is “ihtimam” (meticulous attention). Gizem Kendik Önduygu, in her article titled “Can We Build a New Culture of Care Together?” references Burcu Meltem Arık and notes that she uses the word “ihtimam” as a counterpart to “care.” See: Gizem Kendik Önduygu, “Can We Build a New Culture of Care Together?”,Medium, December 28, 2023,<a href="https://medium.com/@gizemkendik/yeni-bir-ihtimam-k%C3%BClt%C3%BCr%C3%BCn%C3%BC-birlikte-olu%C5%9Fturabilir-miyiz-b70b98298785" target="_blank">https://medium.com/@gizemkendik/yeni-bir-ihtimam-k%C3%BClt%C3%BCr%C3%BCn%C3%BC-birlikte-olu%C5%9Fturabilir-miyiz-b70b98298785</a>.</li><li>4Jillian Steinhauer, “How Mierle Laderman Ukeles Turned Maintenance Work into Art”,Hyperallergic, February 10, 2017,<a href="https://hyperallergic.com/355255/how-mierle-laderman-ukeles-turned-maintenance-work-into-art/" target="_blank">https://hyperallergic.com/355255/how-mierle-laderman-ukeles-turned-maintenance-work-into-art/</a>.</li><li>5Ayşe Boren, “My Labor Will Become My Work”,e-Skop, February 26, 2017,<a href="https://www.e-skop.com/skopbulten/sanat-ve-emek-emegim-eserim-olacak/3289" target="_blank">https://www.e-skop.com/skopbulten/sanat-ve-emek-emegim-eserim-olacak/3289</a>.</li><li>6The members of the Care Collective include researchers such as Andreas Chatzidakis, Jamie Hakim, Jo Littler, Catherine Rottenberg, and Lynne Segal.</li></ol></div>

The second group exhibition of Quick Art Space, curated by Nergis Abıyeva, will take place between September 14 and November 15. 

The Balance of Wisdom

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“

Wandering Through the Kiosk of Kismet

You can download the press kit of the exhibition from here.

Exhibition

<h2>Vague Voids and Vortexes Within Us</h2>I started to engage with Bahadır’s works in the summer of 2020. At the time, I was preparing the monography titled Murat Sinkil: Dervish of Contemporary Painting. While researching Murat Sinkil, who passed away in 2016, the artist’s family and friends referred me to Bahadır for an interview. It was around this time that Bahadır had decided to move his studio and home out of Istanbul and first settled in Sapanca. When we visited the artist’s studio in Sapanca as a team of five composed of writers, curators and collectors from Istanbul, we found ourselves in a kind of &#39;land of strange wastes&#39;. I was stunned by how Bahadır’s production was in constant movement, how he used a variety of materials, the way he transformed other people’s waste like an alchemist, as well as the companionship he had with Kangu, his dog. Since that day, I have had the urge in me to share with the audience the transformation of Y. Bahadır Yıldız’s works after Galeri Apel.<h3>Waste Plastic and Carrion Aesthetics</h3>When we first started to sow the seeds of Quick Art Space, I invited Bahadır to Quick Tower. He warmed up to the idea of &#39;taking over&#39; the lobby starting from the square of the building, which was not built as an exhibition space in the first place and naturally does not stand out as a classical exhibition space, but has great interaction all around. (I think that in addition to our dialogue, the cat and dog stakeholders of Quick Tower also influenced Bahadır’s decision!) While thinking about the framework of the exhibition, we focused on the concept of &#39;carrion aesthetics&#39; that Bahadır himself came up with. Referring to the repulsive visuality of waste plastic, carrion aesthetics takes a unique place in terms of defining both the artist’s production and thinking practice. Bahadır, who takes over the Quick Tower’s square with sculptures, has created gigantic works from waste materials fit for open air and changing weather conditions.The artist made these anthropomorphic sculptures in 2015 using molten raw materials and discharge out of waste in the plastic factory production areas in the industrial zone. He transforms waste raw materials into hybrid figures during the production process in the zone. The works he produces by utilizing a gap of mass production in the factory production area are also subject to a performative process.These interactive sculptures, created by using treated fossils as plastic raw materials, are like the above-ground representations of fossils from the underground. This installation, which at first glance appears as a kind of playground for adults, children, and animals, also showcases the artist’s skill in applying large-scale sculptures outdoors.<h3>Conceptualizing the Material</h3>The artist, whose materials range from plants, shells, residues and natural dyes to industrial wastes, has also realized his works in places such as mountains and forests at different periods of his life. Focusing on human beings, their habitat and their relationship with other species in his works in the last decade, especially on the axis of nature-urban duality, the artist works on the similarities of human neurons in nature with materials such as root paint obtained from natural remains. The "Dendrite" series, which he started in 2014 as well, are made with paints produced from the remains of nature, roots and plants collected from the forest. The dendrite, which acts as a receiver in neurons, takes its name from dendron, which means tree trunk, because it resembles a tree in terms of form. While roots ensure the survival of a tree by collecting nutrient particles accumulated by nature, dendrites act as the source of life by transmitting all kinds of information from the environment to the brain. As such, information from a single source multiplies and gains completely different meanings. It creates an integrity of meaning like the nitrogen extracted from the soil by the roots becoming complexed in the tree turning into an apple.<h3>Sandpaper</h3>Becoming interested in sandpaper in 2007 when he made sand sculptures, Yıldız collects and transforms pieces from the waste containers of a sandpaper factory after various experiments. According to the artist, the spiral forms, which grow and move by overlapping with the reiterated act of wrapping , try to establish an imaginary affinity with the defence mechanisms of a person, with the structure that he weaves and grows as a shell. Perceiving the sandpaper as a shell and attempting to conceptualize the material itself, Bahadır treats the material as a structure that he constructs for himself and weaves between himself and the outside.The artist explains as follows the sculpture titled "Ouroboros", which he started to make using sandpaper again when he stayed at home during the pandemic in 2020.<blockquote>Setting off from a point and continuing in circular movements, the form merges and integrates with its own end. The resulting spiral form is Ouroboros, which symbolizes the cycle of life, devouring and rebirthing itself, and which also means integrity. The sculpture symbolizes the moment when the snake, swallowing its own tail, moves towards/against itself. The power, rhythmic movement and energy required for the beginning are present in Ouroboros. As the sandpaper is an abrasive product as a material and factory waste, a form-content unity is established, while the cyclical forms that grow by adding to each other create a duality through abrasion and renewal. The waste material, which stands against life, transforms and circulates in time.</blockquote>In the sculpture titled "Cyclic Strategies" (2021), which occupies a different place among the sculptures he made using sandpaper in his series "Psychic Defence Strategies", the irritating particles change their shells and multiply in a soft flow. The spiral forms that grow and transform by adding to each other remind of a woven cocoon that symbolizes new possibilities and transformation with the associations and encounters they create.<h3>Domestic Transformation</h3>Bahadır uses materials such as onion peel, henna, hibiscus, wallpaper, old household items and the like in order to establish an organic connection with the home and he works on the memory of space. Since 2014, he has been transforming household items with waste plastic, emphasizing consumption and habits in his works. For the artist, the idea of turning household items into skeletons, watching their transformation phases as well as getting rid of things is exciting. He takes everyday materials such as graters, pots, fryers and many household items such as bed springs to the factory and uses them in the skeleton of the sculptures or pours 250 degrees of waste plastic on them. By using the materials of everyday life in this way, he rectifies his home and the safe space ‘Household&#39;.Interested in issues such as power, the institution of family, identity and belonging, and influenced by the movements of displacement/migration, Y. Bahadır Yıldız&#39;s exhibition “Vague Voids and Vortexes Within Us” can also be seen as an extension of the artist’s desire to play in unexpected places.Nergis AbıyevaJanuary 2024, Erenköy.Translated by Zeynep Nur Ayanoğlu.

Bahadır Yıldız's 7th solo exhibition titled "Vague Voids and Vortices Within Us" is curated by Nergis Abıyeva and will take place at Quick Art Space between January 13 and February 29.

Vague Voids and Vortices Within Us

<h2>Benal Dikmen’s Women of Troy</h2>Benal Dikmen’s Women of Troy is a site-specific exhibition reimagining her previous solo shows in Çanakkale in 2023. The first at the Troy Museum on March 8, 2023 and the second at the Manfred Osman Library in September 2023, the series in Çanakkale is both the beginning and the result of a long journey. Dikmen has been working as an artist and academic since the mid-2000s and is fond of both painting and writing. For her, image and writing have at times become interchangeable. Dikmen, whose fields of study include mythology, archaeology and history, and who teaches courses such as "Mythology and Contemporary Art" and "History of Civilization" at various universities, especially MSGSU, began to research the places where the narratives that interested her took place. For this purpose, after the pandemic, he spent time in Çanakkale, a city he had long been curious about, and conducted fieldwork. Dikmen teaches courses such as “Mythology and Contemporary Art” and “History of Civilization” at MSGSU as well as various other universities and she researches specific locations where the narratives that interest her take place. For this purpose, after the pandemic, she sets off for Çanakkale, a place she has long been curious about.Much has been said and written on the Trojan War, which has been the subject of visual arts many times. During our first conversation over the phone with Benal Dikmen, talking about her project, I remember the question popping into my mind if it is actually possible to say something new about Troy in a city overflowing with Trojan legends and to create an original visualization of Troy. During our face-to-face meeting, though, having looked at the artist’s works that she had been working on for two years, this question posed by my skeptical mind disappeared and was instead replaced by an infectious excitement.In his tragedy The Trojan Women, Euripides (480-406 BC) depicts the fate of Trojan women who are left behind after their cities are sacked, husbands killed, and the surviving members of families taken away as slaves during and after the war. In other words, the Trojan war is told from the perspective of women. Drawing on both primary narratives and critical readings thereof enriched with feminist perspectives, Benal Dikmen takes a contemporary look at the situation of women in wars of all times: “It can be claimed that women’s work and warriors’ struggle are necessarily opposed to each other. The former is creative, meant to turn disorder into order while spinning wool into yarn. At the same time, the women who sustain life, feed and care for children, are engaged in textile production and child-rearing, performing the work necessary for the well-being and survival of their community. The warriors’ work in Troy, by contrast, is destructive. The death of the warriors in battle removes the care that women took to give birth to these men and to raise them from infancy,” she explains, bringing Trojan women into contemporary art.<h3>Helen’s Double Life: What can we learn from Helen, reputedly the first woman to wear pants,1 about “living a feminist life”?</h3>Helen of Troy is one of the most complex and mysterious characters in Greek mythology. For nearly two millennia, her story has been retold, reformatted and reinterpreted in different contexts for different audiences. Her character has been interpreted in contradictory ways by thinkers, poets, playwrights, novelists, musicians, directors and artists, and changed accordingly. Helen has become one of the most controversial figures of Greek mythology.In the general narrative, Helen is known in popular culture as the woman who started the Trojan War, the woman to blame for everything,2 but in fact there is some ambiguity regarding Helen’s “position” in the Trojan War. According to the narration of Greek poet Stesichorus (630-555 BC), Helen never set foot on Troy. In his poem, he writes that Helen was actually taken to Egypt and the woman Paris is said to have smuggled to Troy was only an illusion, “an image mistaken for reality”. Euripides also bases his drama, Helen, on the fact that she never set foot on Troy, but did live in Egypt.3Against the backdrop of third wave feminism, Helen has been reinterpreted by feminist writers and thinkers within the frames of beauty, responsibility and guilt. In her poem “Helen in Egypt”, written in the 1950s and first published in 1961, Hilda Doolittle explores Helen’s existence from a feminist perspective. She reworks the ancient story of Helen in a way that contrasts with the male-dominated stories of the western world and chooses Egypt as the setting of the poem in order to attribute the character a new female identity, experience and discourse, a new view of womanhood and a new quest for self-discovery. Doolittle’s Helen does not come across as a passive character whose story is told by others; she is rather an agent who can speak for herself.4According to Benal Dikmen, Helen, as the paradigm of absolute beauty, constantly evades anyone who ventures to depict her, thus denies anyone from doing so. Within these limits, Helen becomes an object of the male gaze, which leaves her open to slander and accusation as well as sexualization and fetishization. Thus, in the world of the visual arts as in the world of literature, Helen emerges as both the essence of feminine beauty and a powerful symbol of the destruction that irresistible beauty can wield.The two different Helens in Egypt and Troy, who both conflicted and reconciled with each other, have transformed into a duality that constitutes Dikmen’s work. Does this divergence emerge from Helen’s contradictions in the face of Paris’ love? Dikmen states that whereas one part of Helen wants to go with Paris, the other part prevents her from doing so, and that this divergence is the duality that separates war from love, and the external and power-driven from the internal and psychological: “The masculinity and war narrated by the Greek tradition is marginalized; in its place there appears a story of womanhood and love found in the older, less knowable civilization of Egypt.”The initial divergence between these two Helens gives us a space where the figure of Helen can be depicted outside the boundaries of the epic tradition. The artist, who understands that Helen is humiliated and misunderstood in the Greek tradition, describes her as follows: “When she is considered a victim of fate, she is seen as the silent pawn of masculine ambition and desire and, paradoxically, interpreted as sexually deviant and destructive. For the Egyptian Helen, however, there is no such accusation or questioning. The Egyptian Helen proposes a formulation of woman and her freedom, a representation of femininity that transcends the opposition between unity and division.”In Helen’s Double Life, Benal Dikmen interprets Helen not as a source of inspiration or a point of departure, but as a character to be rewritten and rethought. She repositions the female figure at the center of the epic. The artist does not prefer to put forward a fictive and didactic narrative. On the contrary, she leaves Helen open-ended, contradictory and undecided. “As a matter of fact, Helen seems to evade us as we try to understand her,” she says.As with both exhibitions in Çanakkale, collages remain at the heart of this exhibition. The artist created the works that make up the exhibition by clipping anonymous 19th century photographs. While studying textile design at the State School of Applied Fine Arts, the artist made frequent use of collage, and after graduating from the Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University Department of Painting, she occasionally made collages and participated in various group exhibitions with such works. Dikmen thinks that the surface of the canvas is sometimes insufficient to reflect all thoughts, and that the collage technique gives her more opportunity and convenience in expressing her thoughts and solves the problem of space more easily. Moreover, she believes that when making a collage, the unconscious —the uncanny— emerges from the unconscious, deepening the work.Consciously resorting to anachronism in all of her works in this show, Dikmen sometimes borrows clothes, objects and mythological figures from ancient Greek vases, but she has created eclectic and hybrid figures by adding elements that are not found in that period and region. Dikmen, who creates figures by clipping pieces from figures of various periods, prefers to show the figures with a blurred face, remaining faithful to the “unpresentable” Hellenic figure. Through her conscious use of anachronism, she has expanded Helen’s identity to include women from various periods and cultures who have commonly experienced the problems of patriarchy.The artist collaborates with the artist duo Ahmet Rüstem Ekici and Hakan Sorar to transform the collages into videos. The collages, consisting of anonymous female figures and various objects containing symbolism, have been printed on large fabrics upon coming together on a horizontal plane in the digital environment. The choice of fabric coincides with Dikmen’s involvement with the Carpet Workshop at Mimar Sinan, where she is a regular, and with the fact that she is a textile graduate. In addition to the video and framed collages, we have installed the six works in the space with a light panel.Benal Dikmen believes that mythological narratives demand to be conveyed to our age and should be reinterpreted according to today’s ideas, new art fields and techniques. She continues to act as a kind of “mediator” between mythology and contemporary art with this exhibition. While bringing mythological narratives back to the agenda in Women of Troy, she invites the viewer to examine the time we live in from a gender perspective.Nergis Abıyeva, March 2024, Erenköy.Translation: Zeynep Nur Ayanoğlu.1I learned that Helen was known to be the first woman to wear pants during a visit to the library in March 2023 when we had a conversation with archaeologist and librarian Gül Yurun Mavinil.2Is it a coincidence that the Adam and Eve story in the holy books adopts the same approach?3Karen Bassi, Helen and the Discourse of Denial in Stesichorus' Palinode, Winter 1993, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Winter 1993), pp. 51-75.4Nisa H. Güzel Köşker, “<a href=https://dergipark.org.tr/en/download/article-file/780031 rel="noopener noreferrer" target=_blank style='text-decoration: underline'>Revision of Helen’s Myth and a New Female Discourse in Hilda Doolittle’s Helen in Egypt</a>”, Dil Dergisi, Ocak-Haziran 2016

Benal Dikmen's 7th solo exhibition titled "Trojan Women" is curated by Nergis Abıyeva and will take place at Quick Art Space between March 8 and April 28.

Wandering Through the Kiosk of Kismet

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