Istanbul's KRANK Art Gallery is hosting artist Damla Yalçın's first solo exhibition "Hatırlanamaz Olanın Hafızası" ("The Memory of What Cannot be Remembered"). The exhibition will be open until Feb. 23. Speaking to Anadolu Agency (AA) about her embroidery works on fabrics in the exhibition, Damla Yalçın said, "Embroidery that is often associated with women, especially mother figures, shapes my artworks. I wanted to create a bond with my own memories, taking the role of the mother figure."
Yalçın said that she used light in the embroidery hoops in the exhibition and her works in the showcase. "The reason why I performed this art is that the hoops represent the inner attitude as they are round and take place on the wallpaper. The light activates the sensor when a spectator approaches the works. In this way, the spectators will be able to achieve awareness while establishing relations with the works and space."
Her works at the exhibition were inspired by photos of the house where she was born. "I had a chance to experience this house in Ankara, where I went for the project. My work in the showcase is the part seen from the window of my previous house. This seen part is included in the house's privacy," she added.
Damla Yalçın performs this art as she thinks the hoops represent the inner attitude as they are round.
Yalçın added that she presents a synthesis of her memories and dreams with a phenomenological approach.
"We can tell how we fill the place we live, in harmony with all dialectics of life, and how we take root in a corner of the world day by day. The house is our corner in the world. It is a real cosmos. Our house actually reveals the synthesis of what cannot be remembered and the memory. I tried to present a synthesis of my memories in the exhibition. This is the embroidery of my personal memory, based on my own story. I tried to touch on the poetic basis of places by using poetic images rather than memories. Moving from my old photographs, I placed myself in the images I created. When I focus on the concept of living space, the most precious favor of the house is that it contains dreaming. It saves and protects the past, the future and the present in the house. We can experience memories of our old rooms again like a dream because the places where we lived in the past cannot be destroyed in us. These embroideries, which are used as forms of expression of privacy, carry the dialectic of open and closed ones, interior and exterior ones. They create an obvious threshold between inside and outside, between open and closed. This is the basic idea I want to reflect on my work," she said.
She stressed that 21 works of her take place in the exhibition and remarked, "Some 17 of them are on hoops and the rest are on canvasses. I was working on this context and subject for two years. However, I can say that my production took six months after I decided what to do."
DAMLA YALÇIN
Artist Damla Yalçın was born in 1995. After graduating from Ankara Fine Arts Anatolian High School, she attended Marmara University's Painting Department, where she finished top of her class in 2017.
In 2015-16, she continued her education in Poland under the Erasmus program. Attending the first international exhibition during her education, the artist took part in a number of group exhibitions in Germany, South Korea and Moldova. Conducting many projects at home, after her installation with embroidery hoops in the BASE exhibition in 2017, Yalçın attended the Troy exhibition in Çanakkale and at Darphane-i Amire in Istanbul in 2018. Along with her personal productions, she continues her works under the roof of the art group "Numune," which she established together with five artists.
