Hayy Open Space is happy to announce an exhibition “Once Upon all Times” by the artists Egemen Tuncer, Hacer Kıroğlu, Kaan Fıçıcı, Şule Nur Alev, and Yunus Emre Erdoğan as an outcome from the meetings they have been organizing for about two years. Exhibition opens on May 26th and continue till June 25th, 2023.
Ones Upon All Times presents a group of works that have emerged from these meetings, featuring an approach that is free from ideological perspectives that categorize and domesticate historical artifacts. It goes beyond the curiosity of collective culture in forming standards and instead experiments around several concepts such as monumentality, temporality, and process, through personal retro excavations.
In her article titled “Perception of Time and Crisis,” Zeynep Gambeti makes an observation about the “social life we live, trapped between anticipated and predictable futures and ‘nows’ that are repetitions of the self but do not constitute a formation despite undergoing changes.” Additionally, according to Pier Norra, the century we live in is an era of remembrance that follows the era of witnessing. This process of remembrance involves the reinvocation of collective cultural memory through various deformations. This situation prompts artists to contemplate the cultural processing that takes place in the mind as an activity that extends to the present, and it brings them together to question the connections and methods established between the past and the future. In their individual works, the artists explore various topics using concepts such as Relativism, Regime of Truth, Absolutism, Armchair Anthropology.
In Once Upon All Times, the artist Egemen Tuncer, focuses on the story of the “Victory Arch” in Palmyra, Syria, through a video and print sculpture. Hacer Kıroğlu‘s work, shaped by the use of carbon paper as a copying mechanism, reflects the pain caused by war in Käthe Kollwitz’s print titled “The Widow.” Kaan Fıçıcı presents his video work “Parade” to showcase the coexistence of past cultural accumulation turned into museum artifacts and the effect of stone’s own temporality. Şule Nur Alev‘s artwork “Inversion I,” designed and exhibited earlier at Hayy Open Space in 2018, combines with a contemporary work of the same dimensions, allowing us to understand the interaction and connections between the artist’s changing techniques and subject choices over time. Yunus Emre Erdoğan‘s work, titled “Superposition,” presents a video that draws inspiration from the theory of quantum entanglement, where quantum objects can exist in all quantum states simultaneously.
Once Upon All Times, focuses on the concept of time and includes video, painting, and installation, can be visited at Hayy Open Space in Piyaleoğlu Han, Kemeraltı, on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays from 13:00 to 19:00, starting from May 26th.