Nermin Er’s fourth solo exhibition “Meanwhile, Elsewhere…” is opening at Gallery Nev Istanbul on February 27.
Nermin Er graduated from Mimar Sinan University, Sculpture Department in 1995. In her exhibitions at Gallery Nev to date, she composed her imagined realms with paper by blending our imagination with humor; and created “moments” taken from daily life or broken off from a dream world.
In order to define the artistic practice and the works of the artist, Ahu Antmen uses the following words: “We can characterize Nermin Er as a contemporary interpreter of tradition who has connections to craft but does not flaunt her mastery; revealing the fact that she carries nature in her mind merely as an imaginary atmosphere while creating ‘landscapes’ like any urban dweller. While reminding the shadow theaters of the past, she puts forth the fact that she is eventually amongst the “children of cinema”.
In Nermin Er’s works that blend craft, imagination, humor and romanticism, we see scenes from a fairytale-like world. Owing to their simultaneous display and lighting manner, the selected scenes point approximately to the same time – thus in one respect we become acquainted with what goes on in different places at the same time.
As we continue looking at very familiar scenes, which we feel certain that carry traces of places we know from before, we suddenly realize we are mistaken. Without even realizing, we store up thousand of images in our visual memory starting from childhood such as objects, places, scenes etc. When encountering a new image, our minds tend to compare or match it with the existing ones.
In her exhibition “Meanwhile, Elsewhere…”, Nermin Er offers a series of scenes and like a memory exercise she compels us to remember what we have in our memory and compare them with these images. In the light of these imaginary and somewhat sorrowful scenes, she creates an opportunity for us to catch traces from our past, the current day and the lost times.
In these scenes that are reminiscent of the fairytales of our childhood, nature transforms into a kind of a symbol of expression. Away from the traces of urban living and offering almost an imaginary opportunity of escape, these works originally hold an aesthetical dimension that the artist borrows from cinema and animation. The works take on the order of “moving image” which constitutes the visual language of the cinema, television and digital media age. In the images that give the impression of frames teared off from an animation movie sequence, the narration is expected to develop in the mind of the viewer.
