Taking its name from the book, The Depths of Imagination (Â’mâk-ı Hayal) written by Ahmed Hilmi of Plovdiv, Murat Morova’s new solo exhibition offers an overview of Morova’s artistic journey of more than 35 years. In this context, the display aims to evaluate the artist’s progress in terms of content and aesthetics, the evaluation of his visual iconography and his main destinations throughout these years.
Every single sign that we include in our lives, every repeated expression and every piece of information that we internalize, find an opportunity to be expressed concretely at the right time. Thus, particularly based on the rich philosophical tradition of Islamic Sufism and the heterodox aspect of Islamic aesthetics, the symbols, ideas and texts that Morova has been inviting to his world constitute the main sources for interpreting his visual language. By identifying his adventure with books, which are his main sources of inspiration, the artist reconstitutes the gallery’s wall like a multipartite book. Sometimes created by direct intervention on the book bindings, and sometimes depicted on various documents found inside the books, each of these scenes are linked to the artist’s past series of works through evident references.
Morova’s visual language allows us to read critical approaches with aesthetic expressions on one hand through how he positions himself on the social and political axis, and on the other hand, by containing his reactions to the world’s processes from today’s perspective and containing symbols on his ethical approach. The artist instrumentalizes books that once served the world of information for a period but lost their previous value, abolished or unused, in order to interpret the current state of the world and his own journey today. Using both the books and a wide variety of found frames in the exhibition, working with readymade objects and the transformation of materials stand at a very important point for Morova within this context. Between the artist’s journey regarding the individual, the society and the environment’s relationship and the book The Depths of Imagination, a subjective parallelism can be realized as the book’s main character searches for the secret of the soul and the universe through the chapters, finding himself as well as his purpose by going on a journey towards the depths of his dreams. Offering clues about Morova’s relationship with himself and the outside world, and exporting important parts of this process with this display, his new series brings together the connections between the works and the ongoing sentences of a book on a surface that can be deepened according to the viewer’s knowledge and perception.
