March 5–8, 2015
VOLTA NY
Pier 90
West 50th Street at 12th Avenue
New York, NY
Moving Image
Waterfront New York Tunnel
269 11th Avenue
New York, NY 10001
www.voltashow.com
www.moving-image.info
VOLTA NY with Burçak Bingöl
Booth A1
Burçak Bingöl’s practice interrogates notions of belonging, culture, identity, decoration, and production by blurring the boundaries between these seemingly distinct notions. What constitutes an object of decoration? What is a replica? At what point does an object start being itself? Where does functionality lie in objects? Bingöl’s work is a constant re-working of materials and objects to get to the heart of what we expect from the act of displaying and the consequent looking.
In her first solo exhibition with the gallery in 2011, Bingöl utilized the conceptual framework of the cabinet of curiosities to merge her experiences and materials under the same rubric. Building on this inherent relationship between the exhibition and the cabinet of curiosities’ encyclopedic gathering and categorization, Bingöl created a personal space in the gallery through the objects and situations that she built, marketing her personal within the larger scheme of society and culture.
In the second stage, perhaps intuitively, Bingöl built on the fragmented identity of Turkey, highlighting the breaking from the Ottoman past without stepping into neither the East nor the West. This project, exhibited simultaneously at the gallery space in Istanbul and Art Basel Hong Kong 2014, revolved around the centerpiece of a life-size truck, cast in ceramics. The truck, an industrial symbol, when combined with the material of decorated ceramics, visualized and embodied the tension that artists in Turkey deal with every day, synthesizing locality with universality, both in material and in concept.
Building on what could be labeled as the first two components of the same overarching project, the third and final chapter of Bingöl’s work, which will debut at VOLTA, is a constructed museum, consisting of artworks that will blur the lines between fact and fiction, past and present, and personal and national. Literally deconstructing objects such as İznik tiles and re-combining and re-constructing them with her own works and patterns, Bingöl aims to re-think the notion of a museum and display. The project is an immersive installation by Bingöl in which the artist focuses on the idea of the past, both in terms of her own past and the materials used in the past. Interweaving older works with new works, the artist constructs a narrative, researching the essence of her material, ceramics. The overarching conceptual thread—going to the whole from parts or partiality—is presented through renditions in different media. A vase that is broken on a video becomes a sculpture in the exhibition that winks at the model of the table she is sitting at in the video, presented in this selection of works.
Moving Image with Selçuk Artut
Fog is perhaps a mythical conclusion to increasing anxieties and fears of visual and auditory experiences. This particular work, which includes technological mechanisms and surveillance methods, is hypnotic through its simplicity, showing that Artut’s discourse is quite open-ended and quotidian. The parameters that he sets up, the ways of thinking, might be “enhanced” version of reality but the things that he plays with—the feelings that he works with— are from the every day moment. Thus, the medium of technology, at the level that he works with, becomes one of the cornices of the triangular relationship that he sets up between art-technology-quotidian. The tensions between these three corners becomes his raw material.
