Contemporary Istanbul Artist Highlights
Ocula Magazine brings you the artist highlights from the 17th Contemporary Istanbul (17–22 September 2022), which closed with strong sales having featured over 1,400 artworks by 558 artists.
Halil Altindere, Little Big Astronaut (2022) (detail). Bronze sculpture, chrome plated. 116 x 88 x 64 cm. Courtesy the artist and PİLOT.
Halil Altındere at PİLOT
Little Big Astronaut (2022) is a small, chrome-plated bronze sculpture of an astronaut. The sculpture extends from a project that Halil Altındere first presented in 2016 at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein in Berlin, exploring the legacy of Muhammed Ahmed Faris, the only Syrian to have travelled into outer space.
Among the works on view was Space Refugee (2016). In the video, Faris describes his experience as an astronaut, and then a colonel and military advisor, who joined the pro-democracy protests against Bashar al-Assad's regime in 2011. The following year, like many fellow Syrians, Faris fled to Turkey.
Altındere's is a wide-reaching practice. His charged hip-hop music video, Wonderland (February 2013) (2013), performed by a group of young Roma in Istanbul, was a standout work at the 2013 Istanbul Biennial, curated by the late Fulya Erdemci.
Earlier works by Altındere are now on view as part of Salt's phenomenal show, The 90s Onstage (15 September 2022–12 February 2023), which charts performative practices in Istanbul in the 1990s across its Beyoğlu and Galata venues. Among Altındere's videos is Who U Looking at? (2002), in which the artist points a camcorder into the faces of people on Istanbul's Istiklal Caddesi avenue, where the Beyoğlu outpost is located.
Ala Dehghan at Roya Khadjavi Projects
The works that compose Ala Dehghan's 'Holy Rotation' series (2021–2022) were recently featured in a solo exhibition with James Fuentes in New York, where framed paintings hung on walls painted with light impressions of forest trees and otherworldly creatures.
Each painting braids natural and bodily forms into scenes that enmesh tones of dreams and nightmares; as with Holy Rotation (2022), a pink, tree-like form that appears caught in a moment of metamorphosis into a human being—if not a hybrid creature with humanoid features, during a tranquil, moon-lit night.
Among the paintings at Contemporary Istanbul, each bearing its unique expression of mythic body horror, was one work that stood out for its relative calm. Alchemical Parable (2022) evokes the smooth, surreal strokes of Agnes Pelton and Ithell Colquhoun.
A bloom of bright blue snakes reaches out from a soft sun, their heads angling over a landscape marked by leaf-like veins that form an island over a plane tinted the colour of a humid, rose-toned dawn.
Kalin Serapionov at Art Agency
A column of sixteen photographs—eight-by-eight—each depict a person taking a photograph with a digital camera. Some hold their devices up to their eyes, others have just taken the shot. In each image, light hits the faces as if someone was looking at an eclipse.
Look At Me, David! (2012–2022) is a photoinstallation of images Serapionov took outside the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, where a replica of Michelangelo's David (1504) holds court. Drawn by the waves of tourists who clamour to capture not only David's image but his aura, Serapionov turned his camera to the gaze of each visitor, through which David's aura is reflected like an afterglow.
That the cameras captured in Serapionov's photographs are not cell phones, speaks to the acceleration that has already taken place regarding the deluge of reproduced images the artist interrogated, which effectively renders David's likeness both infinite and invisible.
Looking at Serapionov's series now, one wonders what faces might be captured today in that same place.
Georgia Dymock at JD Malat Gallery
Parting Curtains (2022) is a striking composition by a young painter, still doing their MFA at the Slade School of Fine Art.
A red-scale body painted in oil on linen emerges from red curtains, with rounded arms, hands, and legs. Botero-esque—though directly referencing the rounded, sculptural bodies of Picasso's Neoclassical period, contorted into limbic shapes that curve like the fabric draped around them.
The entire surface is painted to create the effect of a smooth sheen, with a softness that is amplified by the black paint that primes Dymock's canvases. Recalling the seductive kitsch of a velvet painting, an articulated tactility lends itself to the curvaceous shapes that define the artist's bent and twisted bodies.
Apparently, the artist sketches the bodies out manually before digitally manipulating them and painting the resulting composition. The hot-pinkscale oil on canvas Twisted Figure with Fan (2021), shows two bodies softly entangled, as if merging into one lump of flesh.
Elif Uras at GALERIST
Elif Uras creates her ceramic works alongside artisans trained in Ottoman pottery-making at the Iznik Foundation in İznik. This ancient town in the northwestern Anatolia region of Turkey, formerly known as Nicaea, was renowned during the Ottoman era for producing fine tiles and ceramics.
Uras' forms are both ancient and modern. They extend the artist's interest in exploring the tensions between tradition and modernity as contained within the often fraught and contested female form.
Pottery works like Marble Goddess (Pink) (2022) recall Neolithic figurines in shape, only their surfaces are painted in the terrazzo style of a Sottsass 'Bacterio' pattern.
Others such as Bullseye (2022), invoke the later, more ornate style of Ming dynasty porcelain, which was apparently popular at the Ottoman court. Here, a double-gourd vase is decorated in floral pinks; its patterned lattice opens at the vessel's belly to an image of the artist painting this very work at a table.
Ana Vujović at Hestia
To create two works on view at Hestia's booth, Kanonatra (2016) and Meta-Kanon (2021), Ana Vujović layered brightly coloured pieces of paper into a pile and cut into them to form geometric patterns out of their carved-out contours.
Resulting abstractions appear like glitched images of maps, landmasses, or woven carpets. In the case of Ctrl+Alt+Del (1) (2022)—also on view at the gallery's booth—a kilim, or traditional carpet. Scrunched into a sculptural mound, white plaster oozes like hardened lava from its centre.
The title Kanonatra is a portmanteau of the words 'canon'—in reference to the rules and hierarchies that shape canonical traditions—and 'natra', which refers to a weaving frame, linking the work's geometric patterns to the woven rug.
The reference connects to the other work on view, Meta-Kanon, which refers to a meta-memory, given the transnational histories of rug-making and their role in transmitting stories and histories across time and space: a multi-layered abstraction.
Perasma at Art On Istanbul
Perasma is a new initiative by Art On Istanbul that extends the gallery's work beyond its walls. It was launched at Contemporary Istanbul in 2022 with a striking presentation of works by four artists.
Five red clay figurines by Malvina Panagiotidi, The Fools I-V (2022), tap into the artist's longstanding interest in the occult. Drawn from a series of 13 figures, each creature is an embodiment of the tarot's enigmatic trickster: a monster with three moons for heads, in one case.
Placed next to these is Desire Moheb-Zandi's Neither here, nor there (2022), a stunning sculpture formed like a weave in process. From the top, a hot-pink Plexiglass rod suggests the structure of a loom, from which wool, rope, cotton, tubing, P.V.C., and bright acrylic threads cascade.
Completing the display is Alice Guittard's stone inlay studies zooming in on the female figure. In Lisa 6 (2022), a dress formed out of creamy pink marble falls over a black bodice. While Evgenia Vereli's Dedicated to my lovers (2022) is composed of 70 tiles depicting faces that hover over a mountainous landscape.
Yağız Özgen at SANATORIUM
Yağız Özgen's conceptual paintings are uniquely recognisable once you've seen an installation by the artist, given their sustained interrogation into painting as a formal science.
The 'Nebula Rich Part of the Sky' series (2022) is effectively a colour study based on an image of the Carina Nebula—a giant cloud of dust and gas located in the constellation Carina—that is compiled in an online archive titled Astronomy Picture of the Day.
Özgen breaks these colours down into pixels—data, effectively—and arranges them into grid paintings. Often, the artist places bags of pigment on nearby tables to articulate the gradients distilled from the nebula, as is the case in the 2022 works shown with SANATORIUM.
Works from the series are also on view in a group show at the gallery in Istanbul curated by Misal Adnan Yıldız, A bit of Unruly Complexity (9 September–12 November 2022). The exhibition has assembled paintings, sculptures, animations, and sound pieces by artists including Viron Erol Vert, Sam Samiee, Agnes Waruguru, and Slavs and Tatars.
Everything at OMM Shop
The beautifully curated booth for the Odunpazarı Modern Museum (OMM) in the northwest Turkish city of Eskişehir, was a highlight of Contemporary Istanbul 2022 for its sharp, aesthetic coherence.
Known as the first concept store in Eskişehir, OMM Shop is located at three points within and nearby the OMM complex, a building defined by a shell of wooden slats designed by Japanese architecture firm Kengo Kuma and Associates, who were behind the cedar-panel-clad Japan National Stadium conceived for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics.
At Contemporary Istanbul, OMM presented design objects and artworks created through artist and museum collaborations. These include Memphis-design style ceramic mugs by Studio Palu, an indie ceramic studio managed by Dilara Yakici, art deco-inspired jewellery by Güneş Deniz that draw from the Istanbul Grand Bazaar's shapes, and rugs and postcards bearing witty blue-red prints by Bilge Emir.
Among Emir's prints is the captivating In Blue Waters (2016), in which a face etched with worry appears submerged in blue at the centre of a Neoclassical bathhouse. —[O]
