Landscape of Memories brings together the works Carlos Aires, Alpin Arda Bağcık, Omar Barquet, Sandra del Pilar, Memed Erdener, Itamar Gov, Azade Köker, Larry Muñoz, Erinç Seymen, Yaşam Şaşmazer, Lucia Tallová, and Cengiz Tekin, exploring the intricate relationships between human, nature, and memory through their distinctive artistic approaches.

Carlos Aires (1974, Malaga) illuminates the contemporary using historical and anonymous figures, thrusting catastrophe into the spotlight. His practice decodes cultural codes, unfurling societal complexities through a narrative blending individual memories, music, and consumer habits. Aires courageously scrutinises urgent social issues, challenging hegemonic powers and principal institutions. In his works, a realm of duality emerges, where the wicked coexists with the passionate and the complex with the playful, creating a universe ripe for exploration.

Alpin Arda Bağcık (1988, İzmir) challenges knowledge production's reality, scrutinising media images and their linked myths and conspiracy theories. Emphasising the media's anaesthetic effect, he delves into post-truth and authority concepts, highlighting societal pacification through images losing meaning over time. His works employ pencil drawing and oil painting on canvas, weaving familiar figures, world leaders, and historical turning points into real or unrealistic narratives.

Omar Barquet's (1979, Mexico) art explores the essence of space, time, and memory, navigating internal human tumult. His distinctive approach involves an analytical understanding of space, blending movement and repetition, visibility and invisibility. He uses a 'collage' method to synthesise diverse inspirations, creating a 'symphony' as a unifying system. Barquet's work, rooted in collecting and recycling, breathes new life into materials marked by time and use, like flotsam and driftwood. Guided by indigenous philosophies, he advocates for a holistic view of relationships within communities, addressing pressing environmental challenges through the revival of ancestral knowledge and spirituality.

Sandra del Pilar's (1973, Mexico) paintings, objects, and installations deal with the phenomenon of transparency, which the artist understands as the place where the private and the political meet. With the transparent synthetic fibres she uses in her works, the artist materialises dream-like scenarios from the collective and personal memory, overrides our idea of ​​(image-) space and (linear) time, interweaves inside and outside, the world of images and the viewer's body and thus enables another look at the political and social events and conditions of our time.

Memed Erdener (1970, Istanbul) initiated his artistic journey as Extrastruggle in 1997, presenting extroverted works with distinct references. Aptly named, it engaged in a struggle against the dogmatic propaganda system of the Republic of Turkey. In his recent works, Erdener searches to create an alternative language by working with symbols, ideograms, and sentences constructed with images. He has produced Nonuple Series which are organised with forms that go beyond the reductive structure of the language.

Itamar Gov's (1989, Tel Aviv) works explore the intricate connections among history, ideology, and aesthetics, delving into personal, collective, and institutional memory. Using forgotten micro-histories as a lens for socio-political exploration, his sculptural and spatial installations begin with a skeptical inquiry into cultural traditions and conventions. Grounded in ongoing research, his works navigate the intersection of art and politics, highlighting the tension between the known and supposed, challenging assumptions about clear borders between facts and falsehoods, reality and imagination. Gov intentionally avoids providing a complete picture, encouraging viewers to engage with the elements of the works and participate in an inquisitive process.

Azade Köker's (1949, Istanbul) earlier works are mainly concerned with identity and belonging. The artist proposes hybridity as an inevitable survival mechanism, which is achieved through a subjectivity based on discrepancy, transparency, and vulnerability. In her later works, nature is negotiated as a cultural construct. She creates images of nature inhabited by traces of human intervention, which she then deconstructs by a repeating pattern on the surface. Through this layering and reworking of the surface, she disrupts the perfection and legibility of the represented image and comments on the possibilities of paintings.

Larry Muñoz (1982, Colombia), inspired by nature, explores its fragility and complexity through a keen attention to details, little elements, and gestures. Manifesting his practice through sculptures, videos, and installations, Muñoz invites viewers to engage with organic and industrial materials from diverse origins. Contemplating the universal and particular aspects of our relationship with nature, his work deals with the ways we think and relate to the natural world.

Erinç Seymen's (1980, Istanbul) work looks at power relationships and uses metaphors and anthropomorphic forms, which coalesce to create a narrative that directly critiques and curtails modern and traditional hetero-normative realities—especially apparent in his most recent works. Using irony/satire as a method, Seymen deals with controversy and asymmetry stemming from the discrepancies in intention, tracing notions of the permanent impact of loyalty, shared values and the culture of belonging.

Yaşam Şaşmazer (1980, Istanbul) crafts sculptures and installations primarily from natural materials, such as wood, clay, and paper, seamlessly integrating organic elements like mushrooms and rocks. Centred on the human body, her figurative sculptures transition between recognisable and amorphous forms, accentuating the boundary-blurring impact of organic materials. Some pieces portray anonymous or amputated bodies, highlighting dualities of human/non-human and animate/inanimate. Through transformative bodies, she navigates elemental dualities, probing concepts of existence/absence and vitality/mortality, offering concise art that challenges the perceived centrality of humans in the grand scheme.

Lucia Tallová (1985, Bratislava) intertwines painting with installations, collages, and photographs, forging a material connection between themes and techniques. Evolving into spatial realms, her work abstains from intuitive gestures in dominant places. Possessing collage-like qualities, her work forms new systems by storing and rearranging materials, and manipulating residue to grant visually useless elements a new existence. This process extends to her archive, comprising old photographs, albums, postcards, and diverse objects, where she transforms and manipulates troublesome items into a fictional archive, challenging the conventional lifespan of materials and giving them renewed significance.

Cengiz Tekin (1977, Diyarbakır) uses photography, video, and sculpture in his artistic practice. Discussing the rooted social matters such as tradition and family, the artist specifically focuses on both the local and the global political agenda. Through documentation, Tekin unveils the irony behind the trusted routine and presents the uncanny forms that cause interruption. Generally departing from his own experiences, the artist draws attention to the issues of taking shelter and seeking refuge, which he approaches as a global urgency.

Press release courtesy Zilberman.