The solo exhibition "Underneath The Stones: Moment and Archive" by multidisciplinary artist Tuğçe Diri met with the audience at Anna Laudel Istanbul on May 10. The show reflects the rich forms of contemporary art while encapsulating Türkiye's cultural and historical patterns.
Working primarily with oil and acrylic paint on canvas, Diri also employs techniques like collage and thread. She skillfully combines natural materials from everyday life with the legacy of Turkish artisanal crafts, such as tile work, textiles and architecture, to create surreal imagery.
The carefully chosen assortment showcases the artist's unique approach to fusing dynamic, non-figurative, and emotional expression, which can be seen as a showcase of what defines Diri's research-based artistic style.
Diri perceives her use of the graphic frottage technique as a process of recreating and erasing her own patterns and struggles working with specific media. Yet, by interpreting architectural forms in an unconventional manner through the method of abstraction, Diri recontextualizes the physical representation of spaces and regions, as well as urban landscapes, into a new narrative, incorporating the traces left from a past that now lives in memory, but which yet defines the present day.
In her own words, Diri defines the series as an 'effort to evoke vanished environments and cultural heritage,' rediscovering the balance in relationships such as power and architecture, remembrance and loss.
Drawing inspiration from significant architectural structures such as the Hagia Sophia Grand Mosque, Atatürk Cultural Center (AKM), the Arab Mosque and the Molla Zeyrek Mosque, the curated selection symbolizes our evolving cultural and architectural memory, much like the ever-changing stone textures of these buildings throughout the years.
Tuğçe Diri's latest exhibition, "Underneath The Stones: Moment and Archive," reimagines Istanbul's memories by looking beyond the city's surface, intertwining past and present.
