Tuğçe Diri: Underneath The Stones; Moment and Archive

The solo exhibition Underneath The Stones; Moment and Archive by multidisciplinary artist Tuğçe Diri finally met with its niche audience at Anna Laudel Istanbul on May 10. The show reflects the rich forms of contemporary art while encapsulating Turkey’s cultural and historical patterns. This captivating showcase will be open for visitors to see at Anna Laudel until June 30, 2024.

Working primarily with oil and acrylic paint on canvas, Diri also employs techniques like collage, and thread. She skillfully combines natural materials from everyday life with the legacy of Turkish artisanal crafts, such as tile work, textiles, and architecture, to create surreal imagery. The carefully chosen assortment showcases the artist’s unique approach of fusing dynamic, non-figurative, and emotional expression, which can be seen as a showcase of what defines Diri´s research based artistic style. 

Diri perceives her use of the graphic frottage technique as a process of recreating and erasing her own patterns and struggles working with specific media. Yet, by interpreting architectural forms in an unconventional manner through the method of abstraction, Diri recontextualizes the physical representation of spaces and regions, as well as urban landscapes, into a new narrative, incorporating the traces left from a past that now lives in memory, but which yet defines the present day. 

In her own words, Diri defines the series as an “effort to evoke vanished environments and cultural heritage,” rediscovering the balance in relationships such as power and architecture, remembrance, and loss.  Drawing inspiration from significant architectural structures such as the Hagia Sophia, the AKM, the Arab Mosque and the Molla Zeyrek Mosque, the curated selection symbolises our evolving cultural and architectural memory, much like the ever-changing stone textures of these buildings throughout the years.

Tuğçe Diri’s latest exhibition, Underneath The Stones; Moment and Archive reimagines Istanbul’s memories by looking beyond the city’s surface, intertwining past and present. The exhibition will be on display at Anna Laudel from May 10–June 30, 2024.

Tugce Diri
Tuğçe Diri was born in Eskişehir in 1984. She graduated from Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in 2010 and holds a degree in Applied Lithography and Painting. She opened her own studio sequentially in 2010 and continued working independently. In 2019, she completed her Master’s degree at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University with the thesis “Reflections of Traditional Arts in Contemporary Turkish Painting”. Working in series and using materials such as acrylic/oil paint, charcoal/ink pencil, collage, fabric, and yarn, she has maintained drawing and painting to this day at the heart of her production process. Diri is influenced by a wide range of art movements and techniques, from the Arte Povera to Surrealism, from the dynamism of Abstract Expressionism to the design and text-painting traditions of Islamic Arts. Re-synthesizing material, blending different societies’ and cultures’ concepts of history, memory, and the role nature plays within different cultures visual cultures and tradition, is what drives the artist’s artistic process and gives her work a sense of collision, yet also rebirth within and between different worlds the viewer can only slowly comprehend when being confronted with her work.