In the exhibit titled “What the House Remembers: A Lesson in Imagery” put together by Zeynep Sayın with twenty-one artists based on her classes at the Marmara University Faculty of Fine Arts, artworks carrying traces of the home and the road, of memory and loss are on view at the Bozlu Art Project Mongeri Building – in a setting itself originally built as a home – from June 11th to August 24th, 2019.
Taking on the role of coordinating the exhibition that highlights the emptiness and erasures of the home as much as its ‘lived-inness’ and what it, in turn, brought to life, Zeynep Sayın describes the project’s inception in the following words: “I am not a curator, but a teacher, and this exhibition came together with the entire class’ energy. Everybody presented their work in front of the others. Nobody refrained from sharing their thoughts or withheld their criticism. Every other work created its own space. First there was walking, sleeping, flying, dying; then came Home: a lesson in imagery. Students of the Istanbul University Department of Theatre Critique also participated in graduate and PhD classes at the Marmara University Faculty of Fine Arts. These were fast-paced, dynamic classes involving students from a variety of universities and disciplines such as painting, sculpture, film, photography, textile, dramaturgy, and acting as well as voluntary participants such as Nur Ataibiş and Nazan Azeri. I was the one trying to supply and complement the theoretical background. Some came bringing trailing thoughts, some with a text they had written, some with a project they had come up with. Works on display at Bozlu Art Project are completed projects, but behind them lies joint hard work. What the road teaches and what the house remembers set the course of these classes… Just as walking / dreaming / flying / dying involve passing from one place to another, we thought of the home as a migratory image in the temporal sense as much as the spatial. Homes incorporate different time intervals, layers, phase shifts – one enters a time tunnel at home in passing from one room (grandma’s bedroom) to the next (father’s workshop). The elders of houses, their ancestors, the deceased who once inhabited them become its ghosts; they depart from their homes to be replaced by images of themselves. Every image is a reservoir of memory, an archive of the deceased and of homes. Yet alas, in the political conjuncture of our times the traces of the past/ancestors/elders are being erased, history flattened out, memory forgotten, the road turning into a dead end.”
Artworks carrying traces of the home and the road, of memory and loss are on display at the exhibit. Most of the materials are of the standard state academy student lot: pencil, paper, wire, soap. At the entrance is Tuba Güney’s The human mind forgets (Hafıza-ı beşer, nisyan ile maluldür), a work she created by pouring concrete on pills she swallowed to dull her own pain. Yılmaz Bulut exhibits, in a space that used to be a birthing ward, a giant hoof bent from wire, reminding humankind of both its forgetfulness and that the Turkish word for animal “hayvan” – our companions as we walk our path – comes from “hayy” (living) and “hayat” (life). Zaliha Erdoğan Peçe satirically depicts how stopping entails a dead end – a kind of ‘roadlessness’. Kadir Kayserilioğlu has woven a tapestry following in the tracks of We are Cihat Burak’s paintings (Cihat Burak’ın resimleriyiz), while Fatih Temiz has painted the very inability to walk, the sense of feeling trapped, ghettoized, disabled/crippled, of being robbed and rendered devoid of the image itself. As Büşra Tunç pays a visit to sepulchres – ‘grave homes’ with her artworks, Meryem Günana finds her way to the houses of gods.
In the exhibit on display until August 24th at the Bozlu Art Project Mongeri Building, artworks by artists Rıdvan Aşar, Bilge Artuç, Nur Ataibiş, Nazan Azeri, Hina Barlas, Uğur Bişirici, Emin Çelik, Yılmaz Bulut, Esra Kızılkaya Eroğlu, Meryem Günana, Tuba Güney, Kadir Kayserilioğlu, Özlem Köse, Neslihan Öpöz Gökoğlan, Doğan Namar, Zaliha Erdoğan Peçe, Esra Öğülmüş Özkum, İpek Şenel Özayten, Fatih Temiz, and Büşra Tunç await their viewers. The opening night also features a performance by Hazal İspirli.