Neo-Ordinary
Bringing together the works of Can Ünlü, Formless, Kadir Kayserilioğlu, Mert Yavaşca, and Merve Şendil, who live and work in Çanakkale, the "Neo-Ordinary" exhibition opened at MAHAL on 28 April and will continue until 3 June.
The exhibition "Neo-Ordinary", which focuses on the concept of "ordinariness", and promises to contain the essence of a genuine and unmediated human experience, far from pretense and ostentation, consists of the works produced by 5 artists in recent years, gravitating around the concept of play.
The banalisation of art or the artisation of the ordinary attracts our attention with its dynamics of crisis and collapse as well as possibility and opportunitş. Today, art production will either reconcile with the mediocrity of the present, sincerely convince us that it has separated from it, or boldly overcome the seemingly ordinary reality and demand truth and authenticity. Offering a unique encounter with artists living and working in Çanakkale, the exhibition "Neo-Ordinary" brings together sincere, poetic, playful, and ironic productions that approach the ordinary with care, embrace its ordinariness with sincerity, and add surprising layers while reconstructing it with the contemporary tools of art.
Can Ünlü asked Bing AI to produce a text for his new photography series titled "I want to become a machine". According to AI, Ünlü's work, which he created by combining similar photographs taken from dystopian computer games and real life, “shows us how ambiguous this boundary is. It is almost impossible to distinguish which photograph is real and which is a game. This shows us how easily reality can be manipulated and how powerful illusions can be".
The VR work titled "It's all mine" by the artist, who is known under the pseudonym Formless and works in the VR universe, is a new layer of his series of digital universes focusing on concepts such as human nature, body, self, and existence. An installation designed for VR can be experienced within the scope of the exhibition, which is an immersive, jarring, immersive, virtual experience room, and an installation designed for VR about the imperfect nature of human beings, ordinary weaknesses and failings, inadequacies, deprivations, and the dark and uncanny areas of the mind.
In Kadir Kayserilioğlu's video "Garden of Forgetting", inspired by Latife Tekin's novel of the same name, the image of a garden visualized as a dystopian and autonomous region where the human factor disappears is accompanied by the sound recording of a question-and-answer game between two people. "Garden of Forgetting" offers an audio-visual experience that invites the viewer to reflect on questions related to the concepts of forgetting, remembering, acquaintance, strangeness, ownership, transience and autonomy.
Merve Şendil, as a workshop painter, keeps a diary of her identification with the lonely clouds floating in the sky in her playful practice that she has developed for twenty years to look at the sky outside of the workshop routine. Şendil, who compiled the memory of this twenty-year-long act in his recently published artist book "Lonely Clouds", participates in the exhibition "Neo-Ordinary" with a lonely cloud image and accompanying poem, and realises a new link of this long-lasting process in which she tries to capture the poetic essence of the ordinariness of looking at the sky.
Mert Yavaşca's work "Toy Funeral" in the exhibition consists of an installation of 4 toy figures and a chocolate box and an oil canvas. While reconstructing a play mise-en-scene that the artist constructed in his childhood, it examines both the functioning of social dynamics that infiltrate children's games and the manifestations of reality mediated in the processes of representation.
Organised by CABININ and curated by Burak Topçakıl, "New Ordinary" exhibition can be visited at MAHAL between 11.00 - 18.00 every day except Sunday until 3 June.
