İnci Eviner’s new solo exhibition What Remains, What Returns and Implications opens on June 10. The gallery presents, in a distinct spatial design, the artist’s drawings that form the basis of her practice.
The meeting of Eviner’s visual language and her mental connections of images-and-words create an autonomous system assembly within the works, and an integrated system in the space. Eviner describes the act of drawing as “building bridges between gaps of memory and things in the world” and adds, “Drawing, for me, is an action plan that enables me to establish swift relationships between What Remains from the visible world, What Returns from undefined zones and various Implications. As for the expanse of paper, it is like a psychic landscape, and the violence of complex relationships between the images of this landscape merges with humour.”
The image bank that has formed in the artist’s memory, in the course of her artistic practice, continuously provides the material for the apparatus that constantly deconstructs and reconstructs the relationships between different approaches to drawing. As this apparatus operates, forms and ideas shape the visual language of collective memory that has so far remained concealed. Lined up along the gallery walls, the drawings demand from the viewer to be perceived in two different aspects. Details can be seen only by moving closer to the works; yet that action slows down the gaze and affects physical movement. On the other hand, the way in which the drawings have been installed in the space creates the impact of a distant landscape, leaving the viewer on the outside.
The diversity of the associations evoked by the drawings, help the viewer perceive and contemplate the unknown coordinates of the known world. This experience, in Eviner’s words, “suddenly destroys the clarity of the visible, and turns into an action carried out by images unconsidered.” From images combining whales of great commercial value with handmade missiles to underground tunnels below Kuleli Military High-School; from Taksim Mosque that all of a sudden turns into a monster, to girls wishing that fairy tales about princesses be erased; from gardens expanding out of elephants’ ears to open onto wide planes to magnetic resonance scans of the minds of the insane; from satin teddy bears trying to gouge their own eyes out to individuals single-handedly smashing magnolias during nervous breakdowns: This is a language that involves a boundless imagination yet is besieged by fragments of texts, and we strive to feel our way ahead.