Introspective: Encounters in Time
23.12.2022 – 03.02.2023
Bringing together works by Murat Akagündüz, Erol Akyavaş, Nejad Devrim, Nermin Er, Tayfun Erdoğmuş, Ahmet Doğu İpek, Murat Morova, Füsun Onur, Alev Ebüzziya Siesbye and Hale Tenger, Introspective: Encounters in Time is opening on December 23, Friday at Galeri Nev İstanbul. In the show, which also coincides with the 35th year of the gallery, the works of a group of artists who have accompanied this journey at different times are being matched through their approaches, concepts and forms, spreading across the space in a four-part narrative.
Based on the term introspective which means “looking from inside, self-examination”, the exhibition adopts a curatorial approach that prefers listening to the dialogue the artworks create within themselves, rather than displaying them under a single contextual theme. While the position, role and function of art galleries in bringing together various actors are being questioned in different contexts today, these forms of associations also raise different questions and problems. However, in an environment that proceeds through visibility, the galleries continue to constitute an important part of the storytellers in the art and culture life that still shape the audience’s perception. In this context, examining the choices made by a 35-year-old gallery, its common language and the connections between the artworks reveal important nuances in terms of preferences and approaches. As in all exhibition making processes, as important as balance, interrelations and categorization are, the daily encounters brought by the space, the dialogues and inspirations established between the artists also form an important path in the background of this story from past to present. In this regard, the small stories of coincidences that break away from the gallery’s time flow envisage to create a new field of interaction with the audience. Within the scope of the show, new works accompany past productions.
While the works of Hale Tenger and Füsun Onur reveal the closeness of their conceptual languages especially through imaginative storytelling, Tenger also fictionalises Onur as a part of her work Face to Face (2001-2022). This narrative focuses on the inside-outside distinction of both artists through the concept of “home” and the way they interpret the social and political projections of the time. In another composition that departs from landscape drawings by Nejad Devrim with inspiration from his trips to China, works on paper by Murat Akagündüz, Nermin Er and Tayfun Erdoğmuş, in which they act with impulses such as leaving traces or exploring the boundaries of the material and the surface, come together to create trace, light and shadow games, reflecting the relations of their nature abstractions. A third connection is established between Ahmet Doğu İpek’s approach in his works and Alev Ebüzziya Siesbye’s ceramic bowls. Here, the “artists’ hand” and craft; their passionate and persistent relationships with materials such as watercolour, clay, charcoal; their sensitivity in capturing the changing details in repetition, references to space, fullness and rhythm in their works come together through a common feeling. Another two works in which we capture Murat Morova and Erol Akyavaş’s visual language full of symbols perhaps in the simplest form, bring together the abstract reflections of the micro-macro universe and images dominated by the expressions of cyclical time where the influences of Islamic aesthetics and mysticism are felt throughout.
Curated by Gizem Gedik, the exhibition can be visited until February 3, 2023.
*Galeri Nev İstanbul is open from Tuesday to Saturday, between 11 am-6.30 pm.
