Memories, objects and colors refer to dyslexic condition

Painter Aylin Menekşe's latest solo exhibition, "Dyslexia," will open on Feb. 29 at the Vakıfbank Istanbul Art Gallery and will run until March 11. In the exhibition, the artist portrays records belonging to different periods of mankind. Apart from cultural and social records, the exhibition is composed of collages of organic and inorganic materials that human perception has created along with the human mind's working principles and memory games. Menekşe uses the records to gain a better understanding of societies, looking at fictional elements that are created culturally as well as adding an original story to her works. In her compositions, which are created with the concept of time and place, she tries to interpret the past recordings of mankind through different readings.



Menekşe wants to draw attention to and raise awareness of dyslexia, a condition that gives people trouble with reading and learning despite normal intelligence. She will donate half of the revenue of her exhibition to the Turkey Dyslexia Foundation.

There are people suffering from dyslexia among those who are considered the most intelligent scientists and artists in history. Today, children are mostly diagnosed with dyslexia in elementary school, but they are alienated and ridiculed in Turkey due to ill-informed social surroundings and friends. Despite the fact that dyslexia has nothing to do with intelligence, it is mostly regarded as a mental deficiency. Dyslexia is defined as "the illness of the genius" by experts, and Turkey Dyslexia Foundation identifies dyslexia as "difference in learning and perception."

Menekşe, who also works as an art teacher at a middle school, believes that people alter the cause and effect relationship when they record an event in their memory and they create new information and ideas according to these distorted memories. Finding this approach analogous to dyslexia, ahe focused on the differences in perception and fictional creations in her works.

By making use of the definition of dyslexia in her work, Menekşe connects the records and the images of the past with new perceptions. Similar to the creation of historical progress, which is affected by ideologies, human perceptions, cultural differences and collective memories of people and societies, the artist believes that these elements should be taken under consideration while studying an artist, his/her biography and artworks.