Antonio Cosentino
boxes of cigarettes and whisky all over the sea, ferâre, my love
May 18–July 2, 2016
Opening: Tuesday, May 17, 6:30pm
Zilberman Gallery
İstiklal Cad. Mısır Apt. No:163
Beyoğlu
Istanbul
Zilberman Gallery-Istanbul is pleased to announce the opening of the exhibition by Antonio Cosentino, titled boxes of cigarettes and whisky all over the sea, feråre, my love along with the book of the project.
Antonio Cosentino is one of the three founders of the artist initiative Hafriyat, which was founded in 1996 and became highly influential in Istanbul’s art scene in the 2000s.
In Cosentino’s paintings, one finds a wealth of images distilled from everyday life, the depths of personal memory, and the visual culture of the artist’s city, which the artist uses in his photographs, paintings and sculptures. The artist continues this tradition through different materials in his exhibition at the gallery, creating an atlas of today’s Turkey.
Ferâre, a tin car that can be read as a continuation of the sculptures playing a central role in the artist’s practice, is at the core of this exhibition. Cosentino is influenced by the ability of tin to be recycled and reused, an industrially nonconsumable material. He uses this material from design to production to portray humorously his process that is reminiscent of that of a craftsman who works alone. Through a tin car, he reveals the accepted relationship between waste and value from an ironically charged, novel perspective.
Just like the collective nature of our personal memory, the whole exhibition shows modes of remembering. Irony is replaced by heaviness in the portraits of Masist Gül where Gül’s facial expressions are full of terror. The reproductions of various portraits from Masist Gül’s hand-drawn comics from the 1980s are reminiscent of the trauma and violence that Masist, who was Armenian and was from Adana, used in his comics as a method of self-healing.
The series of paintings are reflections of the complicated projections of the environmental and urban architecture. The coldness of marble and its nothingness refer to psychological layers, while constructing an inventory of states of mind. Within this context, Masist’s overflowing desperation, efforts; the car’s absurd warmth; the other works’ “shabbiness, nostalgia, shifting rhythm” (in the artist’s words) in the exhibition converge to produce an “intuitive perception” rather than a “lofty narrative.”
boxes of cigarettes and whisky all over the sea, feråre, my love exhibition by Antonio Cosentino is accompanied by a book, with texts by Marcus Graf, Burcu Pelvanoğlu, and Derya Yücel and published by Zilberman Gallery.
boxes of cigarettes and whisky all over the sea, feråre, my love by Antonio Cosentino can be visited at the gallery’s main exhibition space on the third floor of Mısır Apartmanı until July 2. For more information, please contact Zeynep Temiz at zeynep [at] zilbermangallery.com.
Antonio Cosentino graduated from the Department of Painting, Faculty of Fine Arts at Mimar Sinan University in 1994. He founded the art initiative Hafriyat with Hakan Gürsoytrak and Mustafa Pancar in 1996. His recent exhibitions include Istanbul, Passion, Joy, Fury (curators: Hou Hanru, Ceren Erdem, Elena Motisi and Donatella Saroli, MAXXI National 21st Century Arts Museum, Italy, 2015), Mom I’m Going Out to Pour Some Concrete (with Extrastruggle, Studio-X, Istanbul, 2015), Escape from Marmara Sea: The Stelyanos Hrisopulos (Salt Ulus, Ankara, 2015), Departure Marmara Sea (Bergsen & Bergsen, Istanbul, 2013) and Tin City (Külah, Istanbul, 2013). Having participated in numerous exhibitions both in Turkey and abroad, Cosentino contributed works to Spare Time, Great Work (Platform 3, Munich, 2011), and Tactics of Invisibility (Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna; Tanas, Berlin; ARTER, Istanbul, 2010–11) with the collective Hafriyat. The artist lives and works in Istanbul.
