Meliha Sözeri is preparing to welcome audiences with her second personal exhibit “Çevren / Horizon” at Bozlu Art Project from July 8th to August 28th, 2021. Range of vision, horizon/vanishing line, the horizontal, the lost, the eternal and existing within the limits of the human eye constitute the main point of departure for this exhibition. It draws connections between the process of artistic creation and the state of being in quarantine, the act of shutting (down). In exploring the aura of the artwork, she associates the artist’s site of production with quarantine rooms.
Meliha Sözeri is interested in the reification of life and the displacement of relations between the subject and object by the viewer’s gaze. Wire, which emerges as the dominant material used in the exhibit, occupies an axis from existence to absence. As a reminder of the darkness beneath the sparkle, the weight behind the light, the craftsmanship following the digital, the waste in the wake of the living, it points to the deep emptiness encroaching upon the horizon from a poetic place.
The artist’s artworks situate the line between the ground and the sky directly opposite the viewer’s eye. Modelling the infinite line where the ground and sky appear to merge using ordinary objects from everyday life, she cuts, weaves and brings together metal wire mesh material to turn it into interrupted lines. In this sense, the exhibition offers a new “horizon” or surroundings of a kind – for the spiritual veil enveloping/surrounding the essence of a being, the aura, is determined with reference to the horizon. The aura of a being is formed according to its distance from the horizon or its surroundings. Does a crystal chandelier without a shimmer, a mirror without a reflection, a typewriter that doesn’t write still possess an aura? That which has an aura is fast being assimilated and lost in the horizon of the ordinary.
The pieces comprising the exhibit include: a chandelier (reproduction of 17th century styles), a mirror (evoking the 1900s), pillows (disturbingly linear), a typewriter (belonging to the artist’s deceased grandfather), a computer (our innards in the digitalising world), a canvas (bearing words borrowed from Edip Cansever’s poem yok mu var/is there not), words passed down in the family describing the place where the poem on the gallery wall meets sculpture, and a sewing machine – a machine sewing the exhibition together and İlhan Berk’s “Sentences” (“Tümceler”):
“Place is what surrounds the object.
Contemplating (in) place…
If it exists:
How So?”
This is an invitation to wander about somewhere between poem, sculpture, text, body, object, place, ground and sky.
The exhibition “Çevren / Horizon” shall be on view at the Bozlu Art Project Mongeri Building from July 8th to August 28th, 2021.
Within Covid- 19 precautions;
- There will be no opening cocktail.
- It is necessary to wear mask and maintain the social distance determined by the Ministry of Health during visits.
- Up to 5 people can enter the building at the same time.
- The exhibition can be visited between 10.00 – 17.30.
