Dimensions: Variable. Stainless Steel table 5′ X 4′ X 2′ (152 cm X 121 cm X 61 cm)
Seeking ways to stay in the United States after my studies, I started obsessively Xeroxing the same photograph from my American visa on countless legal size paper. Each one of these sheets were soaked in slip clay (liquid form of clay), dried and fired in the kiln. Clay coated pieces were then peeled from the air pockets, occurred due to the burnt paper in the middle, to reveal the image of my visa photograph imprinted on fragile thin sheets of clay.
Mimicking a customs gateway, this installation was complete by a continuous sound of passports being stamped.
Curated by Devrim Kadirbeyoglu, exhibited at Dam, Stuhltrager in NY.
Creating the melody: the foreground world of extensive consumerism, deadly conspiracies and reckless violence.
We live in a world propelled by extensive consumerism where marketing tactics and media bombard, humming under even the rarest of silent moments. Society’s omnipresent noise is a constant reminder of the man made world- a loud band of money, technology and war that never turns off the amps.
One can tune out… Turn to numbness… Even have amnesia, ignoring the chorus they know is building with familiar notes. Others conduct the paranoia and measure public anxiety. Still others are just frustrated and exhausted finding a way to overpower the relentless drone. Or one can just submit to listening. Symptoms of the times.
Inherently, society thrives on using all natural resources its able to get its hands on. Even a resource as abstract, boundless, sacred, simple and as seemingly plentiful as silence. All quiet moments to think end interrupted… WHITE NOISE.
Single channel video of a 5 second loop, motion sensors.
A woman, on the streets of any large city in Turkey, is surely to hear remarks of appreciation,
occasionally favorable and once in a while disgraceful. Accustomed to the attention, I was
astonished to observe peoples strange ways of avoiding any eye contact in the United States. I felt at
home during my travels to Cuba, Havana, being a magnet of attention. Unlike my culture, women
of Latin American societies would also express liking and possession through a simple sound
made by the tongue and mouth ‘Pst’.
Sensor activated by gallery visitors, a video sculpture of a man with red lipstick, representing
both female and male, would appear on a TV screen calling out ‘Pst. pst…’.
Defining order and the process of creating arrangements is a bi-product of daily routine. For artists, cycles of creation and destruction in life can inspire work conceptually and aesthetically.
For the exhibit ‘ONE IS BETTER’ artists explore repetition and pattern to redefine the notion of “multiples”. Contrasting mass production, each multiple is a series of related works revealing one whole picture of a complex system.
Dimensions: 24’ X 5’ X 5’ (730 cm X 153 cm X 153 cm)
A tower was constructed using drywall and aluminum studs. Concealed in the gallery space,
perceived as a column, viewers were soon intrigued to investigate the slamming sound coming
from the inside of the structure. By entering into the tower through a narrow threshold,
spectators found themselves looking up at a long vertical hallway. Confounded by the unusual spatial
manipulation, they were then startled by the sound of the door at the top of the tower slamming loudly,
leaving the space dark and even more claustrophobic than before.
A coffin, wooden bridge, hidden camera, screen, computer.
Dimensions: 6’ 1/2” X 7’ 1/2” X 3’ (201 cm X 231 cm X 90 cm)
A narrow, rickety, wooden bridge leads to a coffin. Viewers walk up the plank of wood to the
casket’s door. Once enclosed inside the coffin, s/he comes face to face with her/his own path.
A hidden camera captures any individual traveling up the bridge and ultimately disappearing inside
the coffin. The footage is played live, with a 15 second delay, inside the coffin’s shut door. The
viewer finds her/himself watching their own symbolic death in a claustrophobic setting where
they cannot turn their head to look away.
This piece is dedicated to my stepmother, Josiane Leila Peret, who died from throat cancer in
Geneva, 2006.
Arcade Skill Crane and stuffed sculptures of The HSBC Bank, McCarren Pool and the Domino Sugar Factory of Brooklyn.
Dimensions: 6’ 1/2” X 3’2” X 2’2” (200 cm X 98 cm X 68 cm)
The neighborhood that I live in Williamsburg, the most western edge of Brooklyn that looks on to the eastern edge of Manhattan, has been named “the next Soho”.
In the past ten years, Williamsburg has gone from an abandoned neighborhood, filled with car garages and artists’ studios, to become the next yuppie destination in New York City. As rent prices sky rocket the artists are being pushed out further into Brooklyn and the other boroughs of NYC. Williamsburg is slowly but surely becoming completely gentrified *.
The HSBC Bank building, the McCarren Pool and the Domino Sugar Factory are all buildings that symbolize not only Williamsburg’s past, being some of the oldest remaining buildings there, but also its future, as they stand on the verge of demolition and are constantly in the center of public debate about their conservation.
For only 25¢ you could also own one of these highly valued landmarks.
* Gentrification: Act of increasing property value by selling property to people wealthier than the current owners.
An upside down forest from discarded Christmas trees found on the streets of Brooklyn, New York.
Dimensions: Variable. 28 Retail Size Christmas Trees were exhibited at Dam, Stuhltrager Gallery.
On Christmas Eve 2007, I picked up two discarded Christmas trees from the streets of Brooklyn, NY.
In the following weeks, I dragged many more into the gallery space, to later hang them upside down
from the ceiling with hangman’s knot.
Detritus Forest is a requiem for what has already lived: Evergreens raised to be chopped down,
adorned, go out of fashion, die and be disposed of. A luscious, yet deceased, inverted forest of
discarded Christmas pines swing softly- a poetic symbol for consumption. Detritus Forest does
not assign judgment. Instead, it confronts the viewer with the remains of a common and accepted
social practice. It is composed from by-product of the environmental issue itself.
Detritus Forest questions what we use as materialists, leaving us to evaluate actions, surroundings
and priorities.
A red suitcase (color of the Turkish flag) full of silk screened cotton puppet emigrants, sound.
Dimensions: Variable
For EU I silk-screened portraits of 27 Turkish citizens onto cotton puppets. Their faces are only sketched out in a black outline, making them easily recognizable, but at the same time, possibly anonymous.
‘… EU is an installation which the artist created in 2008. A group of people which probably would not come together under normal circumstances are packed in a red suitcase and sent to the EU. This group, consisting of people from different ethnicities, intellectuals, sociologists, Islamists, and homosexuals, have resisted the status-quo, asked for freedom, and as a result, have suffered state repression and punishment. EU represents relative freedom for those opposing the status-quo. Kadirbeyoglu doesn’t differentiate among these individuals and have them traveling in the same class. These people packed in the same suitcase are assembled due to offenses to their freedom of expression and thought rather than what they defend. The sound of this installation is an airport -or another port of exit- announcement referring to the names and acts which caused the deportation/expatriation/exile of these individuals. As we listen to the announcements, it becomes less clear who is guilty: the people whose names are announced, the listeners or those who caused the expatriation.’ Isin Onol, 2009
The inspiration for putting the puppets in the symbolically red suitcase came from the childish wish to curl up in a suitcase and being taken, easily, to a faraway place. A childish wish that cannot imagine the actual horrors of the illegal stowaway, attempting to flee to a safer, better place.
Re-cycled water pipes, motor, digital temperature controller, motion sensor, sewing mannequin and mannequin hands.
Dimensions: Variable
I collected lost gloves for four years from the streets of New York City.
In Case of Loss, Please Return To: is a “Lost and Found” department, where discarded objects and
fleeting experiences have been picked up, collected, and remembered to be reassembled and reused.
The Hybrids are the lost gloves’ reincarnations, brought together to make new pairs and keep warm.
Every part of this project is recycled.
The jacket comes with simple instructions on how to make your own from found gloves.
The taller of the Hybrids is triggered by a motion sensor and he starts rubbing his hands by the help of
a motor.
An old hand drill is the mechanism of the smaller robot and it’s manually hand cranked.
This project would not have been possible without the generous help of Acro Mekatronik. Many thanks
to the Kucukerdem Family.
For some it's an ugly, unspiritual perversion of Renaissance art. But mannerism's eccentric poetry has a rightful place in historyThey called it "the manner". The manner was precious, artificial, convoluted, a bit pretentious, often dry, always unnatural. It was everything that good, healthy, humane art is not supposed to be. And often, i […]
Print subscriptions Andrew Jeffrey Wright’s print subscription business is laid out in A.D. Amorosi’s story today in the Inky on an artist finding an alternative way to sell. Turns out it has historical precedentsl. Worth reading down to the final quote for Wright’s mordant wit. (For more on prints and making money, Andrea had something about [...] […]
