Turkish Art Nice and Simple

With:
Mehtap Baydu
Bashir Borlakov
Aslı Çavuşoğlu
Banu Cennetoğlu
Cevdet Erek
Ha Za Vu Zu
Nuri Kuzucan
Ali Miharbi
Yasemin Özcan
Serkan Özkaya
Güneş Terkol
Vahit Tuna
Shiri Zinn

Curators: Ece Pazarbaşı & Rene Block

It is a wind indeed. A southern or southwestern wind whose name is rooted in the Greek “Notus”. Lodos has many stirring influences on its subjects. The Lodos wind is the cause of high emotions, even headaches or difficulties in breathing, but only when you are at the coordinates 39.1988° N, 34.0723° E. It collects many things from different geographies and peoples, be it Sahara desert sand or Mediterranean salt; it races over the surface of the Aegean Sea towards the Black Sea. “Lodos’s eye is watery,” they say, as it always brings heavy rain with its warm, soupy skies. It is a wind indeed charged with mixed and unpredictable feelings, far from any clichés attached to its land.

This exhibition invites artists from Turkey “to create some fresh southern summer wind parallel to the Berlin Biennial and documenta” as Rene Block, co-curator of the exhibition, puts it, aiming “to defy this prevailing cliché” of “Turkish art, nice and simple.” Having been accustomed to the clichés projected on this land of strange winds by the West, sensitivity to these templates has been nurtured, especially in the art scene in Turkey. This exhibition is not an act of standing against these clichés; on the contrary, it simply brings along a diligent selection from Turkey, where artists’ works – by their very nature – do not fit this cliché. Their nature is quite close to Lodos, it is just as unpredictable and eclectic. The exhibition brings together artists who are in a position to evaluate and question this contemporary era from an elevated level; scanning every component of the landscape like the wind that constellates today’s society, politics, history and culture with its oppositions and coalitions.

This is not to deny national attributions or the dimensions of identity; this is just to show that the art scene in Turkey is not focusing just on the given patterns. Cevdet Erek, Ha Za Vu Zu , Nuri Kuzucan, Ali Miharbi and Serkan Özkaya have a reading of daily and city life that adds their own personal components; whereas Banu Cennetoğlu’s collaborative works with Yasemin Özcan and Shiri Zinn offer a perspective on institutional criticism; Güneş Terkol’s work is another take on relational aesthetics; Vahit Tuna and Aslı Çavuşoğlu’s works critique politics and social history in a playful way, and Bashir Borlakov brings a fictive wind from different geographies and dreamy minds. Yet all these artists have the ability to create the side effects of Lodos wind in the audience, be it difficulty in breathing, extreme emotional reactions, or a headache! We also very much hope that viewers lose their balance, even capsize, like boats that get lost in the sea in the harsh wind of contemporary readings of life.