TR

October 22 - November 26, 2022

Opening: November 22, Saturday

Hours: 5pm - 8pm

Artists: Gülçin Aksoy, Chongha Peter Lee & Ozan Atalan, Yüksel Dal, Kıymet Daştan, Didem Erbaş, Gökçe Erhan, Ali Kazma, Murat Morova, Merve Ünsal

Curator: Uras Kızıl

Mixer hosts “New Grammar of Images” which is curated by Uras Kızıl and comprises the works of Gülçin Aksoy, Chongha Peter Lee & Ozan Atalan, Yüksel Dal, Kıymet Daştan, Didem Erbaş, Gökçe Erhan, Ali Kazma, Murat Morova, and Merve Ünsal, between October 22 and November 26, 2022.

Named after a 1980 interview by Wener Herzog, the exhibition “New Grammar of Images” is based on Herzog’s 2005 documentary Grizzly Man and stems from arguments of ambiguity, coincidentally, and non-representativeness of the idea of new materialism. The “New Grammar of Images” chooses the documentary of Grizzly Man as its starting point and interacts with it in an asymmetrical way. Unlike the harmony Timothy Treadwell, the protagonist of Grizzly Man, hopes to find in nature, the exhibition does not aim to present the visual imagination of nature and objects in absolute harmony. With reference to the fact that current images fall short in relaying reality due to being data- and human-based and to the assumption that it presents only an interpretation of reality rather than reality itself, the exhibition searches for “new” images that do not reduce nature to an external representation (inherent in its celebration) and is not anthropocentric but multiplies possibilities.

The idea of new materialism constitutes the second theoretical layer of the conceptual framework, and the exhibition, including the works of 10 artists, offers an inter-work reading in terms of the relationality between objects and various techniques, methods of display, materiality, and artists.[] While each work opens up for discussion what is discursive about the agency of the object within its framework, it also undertakes the interconnectedness of another work that is related to it. Ali Kazma’s video work titled Absence in 2011, Merve Ünsal’s photographs titled A Few Words to Drones, version two and her video Or is the Horizon Line Just Another Crack?, and Didem Erbaş’s installation Under the Gaze of Birds  opens the political agency of objects and inter-objectedness up for discussion Kıymet Daştan’s work titled Oblivion Stone #14, Gökçe Erhan’s installation  Colors that don’t fade, and Gülçin Aksoy’s work Solitaj focus on the truth of objects inherent in memory. Yüksel Dal’s series Phase space and Murat Morova’s photographs titled Untitled present an imagination of the external work beyond representation, through the randomness of images. Lastly, placed on the central wall of the exhibition, Chongha Peter Lee & Ozan Atalan’s collaborative work Antinomy overturns anthropocentric thought and looks for new ways of expression synthesizing speculative theory, popular culture and non-binary aesthetics.

The “New Grammar of Images” starts off from the idea of new materialism and imagines the object as something beyond a substance that needs to be represented and is passive and fixed. It investigates overcoming dualities birthed by modernity (nature-culture, woman-man, animate-inanimate, mind-body, substance-spirit, organic-inorganic, etc.) through multiplicity, over-representation of the object, and its “objectification.” The exhibition does this by multiplying the possibilities of the object and by opening up for discussion the political, cultural, sociological, and memory-inherent agencies of objects.

The exhibition “New Grammar of Images” can be visited at Mixer main gallery between October 22 and November 26, 2022.