Bringing together Nermin Er’s videos and video installations, her solo show And the Lights Go Up opens on Friday, April 15 as part of SENKRON – Syncronized Video Screenings, a combination of synchronized exhibitions and events organized by galleries, museums and initiatives across Turkey. The exhibition can be visited until the 21st of May 2022.
And the Lights Go Up is the reflection of a desire to grasp what is going on in the times we loose our sense of direction and our dreams can only lie behind blurry curtains. Although we need light to see ahead and figure out what holds us back, this situation sometimes leads to a courageous confrontation. In fact, sometimes uncertainty seems like a suitable corner to hide out. At the same time, we may have a chance to hide and grow the things that threaten us in this darkness. As the space of things that spread and get heavier expands uncontrollably day by day, the difficult part is to face them before we are completely fallen from strength by them. Thus, we understand that things may not be actually as big as they seemed before and we position ourselves accordingly. Maybe, they are not that scary anymore once they come out from the warm nook of darkness and stand against us. In this sense, And the Lights Go Up can also indicate a plan or a hopeful anticipation.
Nermin Er’s video, City in Rehearsal animates the city’s everyday state of revitalization by setting the scenes from the spaces we live in and walk through daily with a stop – motion technique. In an endless cycle that is sometimes enlightened and plunged into darkness again, it repeats itself in an unfinished state that does not involve us by positioning us as its audience, without showing when it will be ready to be staged. Another video installation, On the Road, was first produced for the exhibition Please Do Not Disturb in Istanbul Modern with the support of VitrA and curated by Ertuğ Uçar in 2013 under the theme of “vacation”. Playing with our perception through its scale, this work stages different landscapes, with the effect of the changing and transforming light that accompanies us along the way. The video entitled Notes from an Afternoon, on the other hand, is recorded as a visual diary of the movement of the light that keeps changing during the entire day and circulates on the walls of the artist’s workspace. Hence, the changing state and different forms of one of Er’s main materials reappears as a repetitive element in her current works in its own choreography.
Galeri Nev İstanbul can be visited from Tuesday to Saturday, between 11 am – 6 pm.
