Füsun Onur
Through The Looking Glass
28 May–17 August 2014
ARTER – space for art
Istiklal Caddesi
211 Beyoglu
Istanbul
Turkey
Hours: Tuesday–Thursday 11–19h,
Friday–Sunday 12–20h
Admission free
From 28 May on, ARTER will be hosting a comprehensive solo exhibition by Füsun Onur, one of Turkey’s pioneering contemporary artists. Curated by ARTER’s Exhibitions Director Emre Baykal, the exhibition borrows its title from Lewis Carroll’s book Through the Looking Glass.
Through the Looking Glass brings together more than 40 works spanning from the artist’s early career to her most recent production. The works in the exhibition cover an era of almost 50 years committed to an uninterrupted research on the potentials of space, time, rhythm and form that are inherent in simple, everyday materials. The exhibition thus aims to offer a survey of Füsun Onur’s body of work, from early abstract geometric drawings to the idea of sculpture as a linear drawing in space; from three-dimensional spatial objects to installations that employ ordinary materials such as furniture, textiles, beads, toys and so on.
Following a route that echoes the intuitive co-existence of individual pieces in Füsun Onur’s world, the exhibition focuses on the strategies the artist has developed in order to expand the boundaries of painting and sculpture as well as to break the borders between them. The exhibition also offers clues as to how the artist’s work has embraced, in the course of her production, quotidian, narrative and even autobiographical elements with the introduction of a gradually diversifying range of materials.
Through the Looking Glass also features a number of previously unrealised works produced especially for the exhibition and premiered at ARTER. One of these is a work Füsun Onur originally modelled in styrofoam for a competition in 1972. This model was revisited and transformed into a labyrinth/space that surrounds the viewers and multiplies their image on its walls of mirror. Another is a project conceived and drafted by Onur in 1993, yet remained unrealised until this day. In this eight-hour long video, a pink boat and three rectangular shapes following its tail are released into the waters of the Bosphorus from the artist’s house in Kuzguncuk and persistently maintain their position against the strong winds and ever-changing currents.
Complimentary to Füsun Onur’s exhibition, a new work by Ali Kazma, Home (2014), can also be seen at ARTER. Ali Kazma this time turns his camera to the house that became the stage of Füsun Onur’s artistic production. Installed on a separate floor to accompany the exhibition, Home parts open the doors of the small waterfront house in Kuzguncuk, where Füsun Onur was born, and still lives with her sister İlhan Onur. The work offers viewers clues about the magical and enchanting world that has been nourishing Onur’s artistic production, as well as a new direction in which Ali Kazma’s work may develop.
Füsun Onur was born in Istanbul in 1938. Following her studies at the Department of Sculpture, Istanbul State Academy of Fine Arts, she continued her education in the USA with a Fulbright scholarship. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions at Istanbul Modern (2011), Augarten Contemporary, Vienna (2010), the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2005), ZKM, Karlsruhe (2004), and the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (2001). She has participated in dOCUMENTA(12), the Istanbul Biennial (2011, 1999, 1995, 1987) and the Moscow Biennale (2007).
Füsun Onur’s solo exhibition Through the Looking Glass will continue at ARTER until 17 August.
For additional information, images or interview requests, please contact:
Idil Kartal
idil.kartal [at] gmail.com / T +90 212 243 37 67 / M +90 542 216 60 09
