Zai Yaşam civic center in the resort town of Bodrum on the Turkish Riviera is hosting renowned artist Ahmet Güneştekin's solo exhibition titled “Sacred Trees.” The opening exhibition of the center emphasizes the irreducible plurality of perspectives and methods by bringing together the works by the artist that use different means of expression.
The center of Zai Yaşam is a new generation library that aims to offer a life experience intertwined with literature, art and gastronomy. The latest exhibition of Güneştekin in the center features the works that the artist has created with the idea of bringing tradition to the present and with the forms reminiscent of the circular structure of treemaps.
The exhibition showcases the artist's bronze sculptures that capture the essence of his creative experiments, ceramic works he made outside of past practices and pieces combining hemispheres of mythological elements and optical illusions.
Güneştekin presents a series of works titled “Gelene-ek” in “Sacred Trees.” The title of the series comes from the Turkish word for tradition and this altered version implies that the traditional things from the past are an addition to the future. The series oriented in tradition does not focus on the things that are left from the past and carried to date. Instead, its works refer to a cultural whole that continues without pause. This ever-changing, pluralizing whole remains alive only when interpreted without interruption.
Güneştekin says things in the past have a future-oriented element, and thanks to this continuity in time, he can go back to the farthest moments of his childhood, to the times when he dreamed of giving form to the light, without interruption. “When I take events out of my memory and tell about them in my works, they are not the events themselves but the traces these things left on me. My childhood that no longer exists can be seen in the present time thanks to its effects reflected on my works. The impression that things leave after they have passed continues even after the moments have passed. The link between the practice of activating past experience in the present emerges in the ‘Gelene-ek’ series.”
The exhibition will be open to visitors free of charge until July 28.
