Vahap Avşar
Black Album
21 November 2013–4 January 2014
Rampa Istanbul
Şair Nedim Caddesi No: 21a
34357 Akaretler Beşiktaş
Istanbul
Turkey
Hours: Tuesday–Saturday 11–19h
T +90 212 327 0800
F +90 212 327 0801
info [at] rampaistanbul.com
Aptly named, the exhibition Black Album presents a turn in Vahap Avşar’s artistic practice towards a darker and more formal place where power relationships are at the center of his questioning. The exhibition chooses to deal with the political in the daily in a rather implicit and quiet manner. Juxtaposing works new and old, it shows a continuing thread in Avşar’s practice that deals with formal issues such as fluidity, permeability and the contrast and the clarity of the black & white extending the formal qualities to their conceptual counterparts.
Night Shift 2 (1988) is an earlier black and white photograph of an Atatürk statue, which the artist’s mentor has realized back in the day. Both in what the photograph displays, namely a founder figure who is omnipotent, and in when/how the photograph was taken, namely in the mentor’s studio, the work is about how society presents and dialogues with a figure of power. The mentor-student relationship is one that forms the basis for production in art since the Renaissance times, when the ateliers were the order and it has yet to lose its prevalence. We see that the power lines which are formed early on in a mentor-student’s relationship extend all the way through the student’s practice: Sometimes nourishing, sometimes frustrating, these lines keep giving, even when the student becomes a ‘master’ himself.
20th Century as We Knew It (2012) is an installation of four life-sized head sculptures placed underneath four upside down columns. The columns form the edges of a square and the head underneath each column looks clockwise to the next head in the square. Thus, while the head of the artist is looking at (up to) the artist’s mentor, the mentor looks at Beuys, and Beuys at Duchamp, and finally Duchamp at the artist himself, thus completing a circle. Conversing directly with Night Shift 2, this installation takes us on a tour of art historical stacking of the master-student relationship.
Giving its name to the exhibition, the series Black Album (2012–2013) is realized with a technique the artist developed in recent years using metallic silver paint on tar felt: In a large pool, the metallic paint freezes at the moment it meets asphalt, a material that the artist used incessantly during the earlier years of his practice. Asphalt Drawings of 1991 were paintings that the artist made at night after his day job was over, and that were the residue of a day’s long thinking process, the physical sediments that stood in for their conceptual counterpart. Of course the sediments only precipitate after a huge flood (of conceptualization) has washed the surface anew. Similarly, there is an instance of chance that the Black Album is built upon since the moment of the freeze cannot be predicted beforehand.
Very close to these paintings formally is the Color Stream video from 1994, in which the river keeps on flowing while the color of the water keeps on shifting. If formally arresting and feeling as if caught in the middle of an act, the paintings as well as the video do draw us toward a literally fluid place, where metaphorically the everyday reality is not fixed, yet keeps us on edge as to what is to become of ‘tomorrow.’
Two similar images, when an impactful moment is arrested, are the two paintings Iceland and Shell from the Explosion Paintings series (2011). Portrayed are moments when an explosion takes place, when the silence is broken, and when we are arrested in a condition of uncertainty about what’s to come next but in awe of the current’s spectacular.
Negatives from 1990 are photographs, which are reverse images of moments captured in a hospital setting. These three arrested moment-images, with their formal reference to x-rays, point to a confrontation with reality. One of Avşar’s traits throughout his career is that he specializes in diagnosis and not in treatment. These x-ray like images are indeed implicit representations of a search for identifying and peeping into the ‘other’s problems, in which the image taker carefully chooses not to identify with the problem, rather isolating it so as to name the diagnosis.
Media relations
For additional information, images or to request an interview, please contact:
Mr. Üstüngel İnanç
T +90 212 327 0800 / uinanc [at] rampaistanbul.com
