Istanbul’s Kalyon Kültür Art Center is hosting a new group exhibition “Magical Things, Waiting Patiently,” featuring works created by seven artists through different techniques and materials. The exhibition examines the idea and process of transforming nature's unique patterns, mechanisms and landscapes into works of art through the concepts of time, effort, patience and detail.
Curated by Sezgi Abalı, “Magical Things, Waiting Patiently” is an invitation to slow down and pay attention to the propositions of nature. Bringing together new and recent artworks by Ali Ibrahim Öcal, Ahmet Duru, Ayşe Gül Süter, Melis Buyruk and Sadık Arı, the show also presents the long-term performance of Dikine Ongoing Project titled “Şey ve Tekrar” (“Object and Repetition”).
Öcal creates imaginary universes that progress in an interdisciplinary pattern. He uses various media such as painting, photography, sculpture, installation, video and natural objects in the production process. The artist, who produces works that include universal, geographical and local cultural codes as much as possible and uses multilayered images of natural elements such as soil, seed, sprouting, growth, extinction and rebirth, invites the viewer to experience nature in the exhibition.
While Duru presents the macro and micro landscapes of nature in different ways of expression, he mostly makes use of his long walks and observations in nature. Tracing the unique calendar and seasonal cycles of nature in Duru's works in the exhibition, visitors also begin thinking about the methods that plants have developed to survive.
Süter, who had the opportunity to examine life at different scales through different organisms in science laboratories where she was invited as a guest artist in various parts of the world, combines scientific data with new media technologies and traditional art techniques in her works. The dialogues she initiates between movement, light, time and space transform into new forms and areas of sensory experience. Süter's works, which will be exhibited in the great hall of the stone mansion building of Kalyon Kültür, are a glass installation based on light and color, mirror sculptures that initiate a dialogue between space, light and the audience and a video made on human cells.
Known for her detailed ceramic works, Buyruk creates new living spaces with repetitive textures and forms in her works where she brings plants, animals and humans together in undefined forms and in an inverted hierarchy. In “Magical Things, Waiting Patiently,” she opens connections to surreal dreams through her realistic but also illusionist aesthetics in her sculptures. While Buyruk's choice of materials, colors and subjects reveal cultural references, it prompts the audience to reconsider their preconceptions about the living things that are always in front of their eyes.
Looking to nature to understand human actions in his production, which adopts the perspective of scientific illustrations, Arı deals with the plunder caused by man's appetite to prevail over other living things. In his detailed patterns in the exhibition, we trace an idea that resists the quest of humans to define and domesticate the wild.
The site-specific long-term performance and video installation of Dikine Ongoing Project, "Object and Repetition," is performed by Umut Sevgül and Barbaros Kayan. The performance, which started by transforming old newspapers into spheres that could fit in a palm and placing them as the beads of a tesbih (prayer bead) one by one, tries to find an answer to the question of what connects the repetitions. While the production of the spheres continues at the stations where the raw materials and tools are located, the concepts of discontinuity, temporality and placelessness are read in the movement between the two opposite rooms of the exhibition area.
The exhibition takes its name from a quote found in the 1918 book "A Shadow Passes" by the English poet and writer Eden Phillpotts. The quote reads: “The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” Constructed on the concepts of time, effort, patience and detail, the exhibition explores the idea and process of interpreting nature's unique patterns, mechanisms and landscapes, and transforming them into works of art.
“Magical Things, Waiting Patiently” will be open to visitors until Nov. 25, 2021.
