curator: Basak Senova
artists: Ali Cherri, Almagul Menlibayeva, Benji Boyadgian, Ceren Oykut, Maria Loizidou, Oya Silbery
venue: ArtRooms
coordinates: Kyrenia, 2015
The fine line between ‘the self’ and its surroundings has always been penetrated from both sides. Yet this line determines the position and the identity of the self. In the same vein, the things ‘the self’ desires to sink into oblivion are pushed to the other side of this line. Therefore, this very line also functions as a tool for unresponsiveness and blindness.
Line exhibition gathers six distinctive works that accentuate the substance of alike lines, which constantly overwrite each other. The exhibition noticeably presents diverse artistic approaches and positions with each work. Aptly, Line inhabits artists and works from different geographies, while rendering and detecting comparable social, historical, psychological, and political realities that surround the artists.
Almagul Menlibayeva
Transoxiana Dreams 2011
The film is about mythological narratives placed and staged in the vast landscape of Kazakhstan, ravaged by 60 years of Soviet occupation. The film displays the brutally changed region of the Aral Sea where its indigenous people live in the Aralkum, the desert of a once-thriving region now entirely devoid of water due to radical Soviet irrigation politics. According to the legend, when the ancient Greeks first encountered the nomads of the Transoxianian Steppes on their horses, they initially believed them to be mythological quadrupeds, part person and part animal, fearing their savage and magical powers.
Ali Cherri
Inha’s Cows 2014
The project looks at the Finnish landscape photographer I. K. Inha’s (1865–1930) Finnish Agriculture series as a sign of the rise of the “modern society”, in which portrait photography has made possible the assertion of state power. By constructing a narrative around the photographs of cows, the project underlines the complex relationship between portrait photography, photographic archives, and the construction of national identities.
Benji Boyadgian
Sediments of Discord 2014
The tension adopted on an element stretches it in opposite directions, causing tensile stress and eventually forming fractures. Like geological sediments, the surface is also subject to tension, mainly man-inflicted. In corollary, the landscape transforms itself into an amalgamation of patterns. Jerusalem, a geographical crossroads layered by rifted sediments, illustrates discord in multiple dimensions.
Maria Loizidou
Self-Other 2006
Maria Loizidou’s video work “Self-Other” consists of a series of pencil drawings where the figures of Siamese twins (connected back to back) attempt to put on a coat made for two. This is a difficult move because of their connection as they are dependent on each other, and yet the act is constantly on a loop. The work refers to the Cyprus Problem that has been on a loop without resolution for over four decades now.
Oya Silbery Waste
Ziyan 2015
Today, as the capitalist system with an informed choice and a great appetite trivialize all elements of existence, we are beset by effortlessly-obtained superficial achievements and commercial trickery. Human beings who are deprived of individual responsibility and awareness refuse to confront their own reality and choose to adopt an attitude intending to corrupt all the values that make us human, without realizing the importance of collective responsibility. This obliges a call to new memento mori to humanity.
Ceren Oykut
My swimsuit is Inside Mayom İçimde 2011-2015
Making drawings derived from the concepts of city and everyday life, Ceren Oykut uses the images she produces as a field of study. By cutting and tearing her drawings into pieces she can create new images, or is able to force them to migrate from their original surfaces through various media, sometimes by collaborating with other disciplines, although most often with the “space”. Her works are an exchange in modes of production such as typography, pictography, cartography, calligraphy, miniature, shadow play, and caricature.
The second exhibition adds Henrik Lund Jørgense, Fatma Bucak, Ibro Hasanović, Hera Büyüktaşçıyan, Emre Ekinci, Christina Georgiou and Oya Akın to the project.
