Artist: Selcuk Artut
The Beyoglu district, at the heart of Istanbul, is one of the main areas that forms the city's cultural mosaic with its diversity and polyphony. Taksim Square, named after the water distribution system implemented by the Ottoman Empire, has become over the years a square of objects in constant change and transformation; a place where the growing number of visitors is allowed to pass through, where alluring illuminated signs find their place effortlessly, and where music, culture, art, and craftsmanship intertwine. It has witnessed both joyful meetings and sorrowful farewells. In the texture formed by the square's transformation, the relationship between individuals and objects plays as significant a role as the combination of formal and structural elements. From the past to the present, people's paths have intersected with objects, and the dynamic relationships that have emerged have created various fields of expression and usage, reflecting the place of objects in our lives and the situations they interact with. With the influence of industrialization, a cycle of needs based on objects, the things needed to make them, and humans began. Now, humans and objects are “entangled.”
The works of eleven artists, whose art imbues objects with deeper and more complex meanings, refer to the concept of “entanglement,” which has emerged as a sociological phenomenon. The cacophony created by the gathering of incompatible objects strikingly and humorously brings the concept of entanglement to the forefront. Thus, it reveals the possibilities of objects, how they intertwine with humans, and how they are immanent to one another. Everyday objects such as low-status tickets, canned food, reflectors, saws, and clothespins defy the canon of high art, while objects such as train tracks, passport motifs, and illuminated hotel signs bring forward ideas of belonging, the importance of constant movement, and the broad expression space that objects hold for humans. This encounter occurs in the exhibition space through the poem "A Sea of Possibilities" that covers the wall, allowing us to explore the limitless and infinite possibilities of linguistic transformation.
The works created with a visual and auditory language in Taksim Maksim, focused on the transformation, possibilities, and entanglement of objects, introduce 21st-century concepts such as encounters, meetings, ennoblement, migration, identity, multiculturalism, nostalgia, recycling, and urban life. "Entanglement," drawn from various social theory and material culture studies, is primarily a cyclical concept that concerns the object nature of things, and then the mixture of human and object, culture and matter, and society and technology. People are dependent on the things they produce, the things they produce are dependent on other things, and these things, in turn, are dependent on humans.
Text by Ayca Okay
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