Sometimes the Shadow Falls Within, titled after a remark made by the architect and artist Zeynep Ünal during a conversation about one of her photographs, brings together works that have emerged over several years through ongoing dialogues with artists around notebooks, dreams, recollections, and forgettings. Curated by Saliha Yavuz, the exhibition explores these themes through personal artistic processes.
Drawings and paintings on notebook pages and leaves, found objects, and various media, such as collages, form a unified whole in the exhibition, composed of disparate fragments of memory and traces of what has been forgotten. Shadows fall inward as if to acknowledge or prove that forgetting is never truly possible.
The exhibition features Gizem Akkoyunoğlu’s notebook filled with charcoal and paint drawings structured like a fantastical narrative, Hare Sürel’s notebook reflecting on “distinctive states” in life and memory, along with an installation of paintings on bamboo leaves referencing movement within memory and recollection; Yunus Emre Erdoğan’s charcoal and thread prints on paper, presented alongside an installation shaped by notes taken in his sketchbooks; A drawing from Şule Nur Alev’s Gümüşçün series, made with pencil and graphite on acid-free paper; Zeynep Ünal’s magical forest photographs; and Selim Kaya’s work which is a continuation of his sketchbooks and artwork Any Time exhibited at Bıçakçı Han in context of the exhibition For Those Drift Away
These fragments of memory and the residues of what has been forgotten compose the whole exhibition.
Guest artist Ceren Yartan joins the exhibition with a new installment of 11 Minutes, a long-paused work she revisits now, reimagined through the lenses of forgetting and awakening.
The exhibition occurs at Hayy Open Space in Kemeraltı, İzmir, between April 21 and May 17.
Today, we continue to believe in solidarity with student movements in Turkey and all those who struggle for justice inside and outside, who demand peace and justice for all.
We are here. We do not forget. We do not lose hope.