Art and mechanism overlap in Server Demirtaş's kinetic sculptures

As September ramps up again, Istanbul looks ahead to major art openings at the city's highlighted venues as well as art galleries like Bozlu Art Project in the upmarket Nişantaşı area. Server Demirtaş's upcoming exhibition "Evvel Zaman Makinesi" (Machines from Bygone Times), starting on Thursday, this week will push the boundaries of static art forms, inviting viewers to a kinetic visual experience with moving sculptures.



Signally a profound change in modern art, kineticism has been perfectly applied in Demirtaş's sculptures, bringing together mechanical aesthetics with conceptual kinetic art. The exhibition questions the human body as a thinking, working and productive machine with ironic language criticizing the contrast between human feelings and the nature of machines. Demirtaş uses interesting ready-made materials in sculptures such as windscreen wipers and bicycle breaks. Through the use of cogs, the sculptures turn out to be moving objects.



Some of his selected sculptures will be the "Thinking Woman's Machine," a mechanical sculpture made of delrin, stainless steel and a motion sensor. The second sculpture is "I'm Bored," featuring a two-hand mechanical system, which can hold and play with a small globe. His third work is named "Gossip," for which Demirtaş designed two women's heads with makeup. The sculpture gives the exact scene of gossiping as one head whispers into the other's ear. These moving sculptures emphasize the poetic dialogue between machine and man, using the human body as the starting point and asking viewers to re-consider the relationship between science and art.

The famous mechanical descriptions of al-Jazari, a polymath, artist and engineer that lived during the Golden Age of Islam, scientific inventions of Leonardo da Vinci in the 15th and 16th centuries and Swiss painter and artist Jean Tinguely's 20th-century kinetic sculptures are what inspired Demirtaş in his artistic process. Similar to Tinguely, who criticized the overproduction of material goods in industrial society, Demirtaş digs into human feelings intermingled in an advanced technological world. "Some human emotions, which we are unable to capture in the frantic pace of everyday life, are displayed in slow motion by Demirtaş's mechanical sculptures," the art gallery said about the exhibition. The award-winning artist Demirtaş studied painting at the Mimar Sinan University, yet focuses on sculpture designs. Curated by Özlem İnay Erten, Bozlu Art Project's first exhibition of the 2015-2016 seasons will run through Oct. 17.