The new exhibition project at Sanatorium urges audiences to make a new discovery in their lives. First, this exhibition looks like a conventional contemporary art exhibition, however scrutinizing the works become a discovery of mysterious endeavor.
The mystery in this exhibition first comes with its main theme, which suggests that, “everything is part of a process.” The exhibition titled “Re-DeGeneration” questions the regenerative process, which is the result of a degenerative process.
The works show how the systems, structures of things, images, in short everything in life can degenerate and re-degenerate within time and also how this becomes a process. This approach awakens a discovery process in audiences. However, the process leads to another new discovery and as the title suggests, “Re-DeGeneration” starts.
The discovery that the audience may experience more or less resembles a theme from a Charles Baxter book. Baxter’s characters awaken their awareness in the world with new discoveries. They hail from various strata of life.
The exhibition creates awareness and leads audiences to a discovery in their lives first by making them realize that everything in life is a process. All the artists in the exhibition, including Yeni Anıt, Elif Çelebi, Orhan Cem Çetin, İnsel İnal, Ferhat Özgür, Çağrı Saray and Rıfat Şahiner, are inter-disciplinary artists. They work with images, photographs, videos, installations and they can make themselves exist in every kind of art discipline and they by themselves make their marks by making their own discoveries in their art style and life.
This is related to the re-degenerative process that the exhibition aims to enlighten viewers about.
“All of the works here in this exhibition have a political and poetic existence and all of the artist are inter-disciplinary artists,” said Fırat Arapoğlu, the curator of the exhibition.
While the technical features in the works differ from graffiti, stencil, painting, photography, video art, the “words” and “meanings” differ in terms of philosophical angles and approaches.
Each word, meaning, image and photograph in the exhibition is part of a process. Artists and audiences also become a part of this.
[HH] Discoveries of artists
How artists come to make discoveries via their artistic disciplines is a tricky question. However, it is also an understandable way to scrutinize their works.
Rıfat Şahiner’s work, “un-settlement,” suggests how a city is an unsettled “venue” for its locals and immigrants. Şahiner wrote about his work: “Deleuze and Guattari, in their work titled ‘Capitalism and Schizophrenia,’ suggest that capitalism as a system creates the action of ‘deterritorialization.’ This results in capitalistic structures and associations, created with the cultural intentions, being destroyed with unsettlement. This will cause a gap that only the capitalist system can fill. Because capitalism, in the end, is just a system and it needs some kind of concepts and groupings in society in order to exist. That’s why it creates new groupings and concepts such as the ‘modern family,’ a ‘new government,’ and ‘Moderate Islam.’”
Şahiner, later on, suggests that “in this context, after a closed, authoritative system in the period of the 1980s, Turkey turned its face to a more capitalistic and competitive period and urban transformation, and migration from rural regions to cities started to increase the population in the main production centers. This caused new cultural and sociological trends. This also led to the creation of shanty towns and ‘poor’ areas in the city.”
Şahiner makes audiences “discover” this situation via his photograph series, which shows the Yeşilköy district of Istanbul. His photographs not only show audiences how Istanbul has changed over several years, but also how the culture of the city was affected by this change. The new-born cultural trends and new settlements yet once again make a discovery of the “new” city that we do not know.
Orhan Cem Çetin’s work shows how the generations are related to each other in the same family. The photo that he took at his mother’s home is the place that he spent his childhood. His main concern is to create an “event” about regeneration and degeneration, and so he created the same scene years later. His re-discovery of his childhood scene and making this a piece of art makes audiences re-discover feelings and maybe their own childhood. As Hans George Gadamer suggests, “When we see a piece of art work, it infuses with us and rather than leaving home we come home.”
For this “peculiar” piece of art work, Çetin wrote in his blog: “That is why I wanted to create this scene years later, with mom, out of whose flesh I was generated. The art bit aside, we enjoyed the whole process thoroughly!”