Arter welcomes the autumn with five new exhibitions

Arter has reopened its doors on September 10 with five new exhibitions. Alongside the exhibitions drawn from its collection, the new season at Arter also features curated non-collection solo presentations.

Curated by Arter’s Founding Director Melih Fereli, the collection-based group exhibition For Eyes That Listen features 23 works, many of which have a strong musical connection. The exhibition takes its reference from John Cage’s experimental approach that combines the use of silence with aleatory music alongside indeterminacy in his art, as well as from various Fluxus artists. Following Cage’s assertion that there is “no absolute silence”, it encourages us to change our ways of listening and seeing, unveiling the fog that inhibits us from discovering the creative and imaginary powers embedded in our sensory system. For Eyes That Listen is the third exhibition of Arter’s “Sound Art Projects” series and focuses on enhancing our awareness of the intrinsic role sound plays in art.

Conceived by David Tudor and realised by Composers Inside Electronics, Inc. (CIE), the interactive work entitled Rainforest V (variation 3) is presented at Karbon as the fourth exhibition in the same series initiated and curated by Melih Fereli. The choreographer Merce Cunningham commissioned David Tudor in 1968 to create a music work for his similarly titled dance. Rainforest V (variation 3) was developed by composers John Driscoll and Phil Edelstein of CIE into a self-performing sound installation building upon their past Rainforest IV collaborations with David Tudor. Rainforest V (variation 3) was acquired for the Arter Collection in 2018. Its presentation in Arter’s Karbon is the world premiere of the third variation.

Engaging in a close dialogue with each other, the exhibitions For Eyes That Listen and Rainforest V (variation 3) function through their conceptual relationship with music, sound and silence in a manner almost like a diptych work.

Drawn from the Arter Collection, the group exhibition titled On Celestial Bodies is curated by Kevser Güler and deals with questions around the possibility of reconceiving and reconstructing a vital terrain for living together in our present day. Including works by twenty-eight artists, the exhibition invites visitors to contemplate together the ways that beings come together and disperse, the manners through which they build relations, and their ways of distancing and converging with each other. The title of the exhibition aims to point to the potentials and limits of the conception of the material embeddedness of beings. This notion of material embeddedness, as highlighted in the famous quote from the 1980s by astronomer and astrobiologist Carl Sagan, “We’re made of star stuff”, also informs one of the fundamental questions addressed in the exhibition: What would it mean to think of an artwork, a pencil, a human, a virus, a robot, a cat, a tree, a creek, a mountain as a celestial body as much as the Earth and Venus are?

In the new season, Arter presents a large-scale retrospective of the German artist KP Brehmer (1938–1997). Curated by Selen Ansen, KP Brehmer: The Big Picture is the last part of a co-production project initiated on the occasion of KP Brehmer’s 80th birthday by four international art institutions. Realised by Arter, Neues Museum Nürnberg, Hamburger Kunsthalle and Kunstmuseum Den Haag, and funded by Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation), this joint effort aims to highlight the artist’s significant position and the contemporaneity of his works. In his multifaceted oeuvre, Brehmer engages critically with capitalism and the power of media, addressing the socio-political realities of his time with an experimental, analytical and humourous approach. Remaining a singular figure of the art world from the 1960s until his death, the artist has mastered a vast variety of printing techniques, appropriating images, slogans and data he reproduced through various methods and means such as etchings, drawings and paintings. Presenting Brehmer’s rich repertoire of forms, motifs and techniques, the exhibition KP Brehmer: The Big Picture also conveys the art historical references that underlie Brehmer’s works, and their affinities with abstract art, Pop Art, Fluxus and Capitalist Realism.

Alev Ebüzziya Siesbye’s solo exhibition Repetition is curated by Eda Berkmen and brings together stoneware bowls the artist created in 2019 specially for this exhibition. The exhibition borrows its title from Søren Kierkegaard’s book Repetition, published in 1843. The inquiries addressed in the book on “whether or not repetition is possible, what significance it holds, and whether something is gained or lost in being repeated” provide insight into the principles of Alev Ebüzziya Siesbye’s ceramic art, which she has been producing since the 1960s. By minimising the variation in size, shape and colour in her works, the artist invites the audience to discover the subtle nuances among the repeated forms. Created by way of countless repeated actions and rhythms, these timeless bowls present both the impossibility of, and the consequent transformations instigated by, repetition. Monumental regardless of their size, they embody the delicate balance and manifest the tension between density and spaciousness, firmness and fragility, force and ease.

The ongoing exhibitions have also welcomed visitors back as of September 10. Curated by Selen Ansen, Cevdet Erek’s solo exhibition Bergama Stereotip will continue until November 15, 2020. Curated by Başak Doğa Temür, Altan Gürman’s retrospective which brings together the artist’s production spanning 11 years along with selected pieces from his archive will be on view until January 24, 2021.

Press Contact 
Firdevs Ev Şimşek
firdevse@arter.org.tr
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