The group exhibition "Recollections of Twilight" opened at Krank Art Gallery on May 16. In the gallery, artists Eda Aslan, Eda Gecikmez, Güneş Terkol and Zeynep Beler invite spectators on a tour within the misty aura of remembering and reintegration through their works. The exhibition will remain open until June 29 at Krank Art Gallery at Le Meridien Istanbul Etiler.
As part of the group exhibition, Krank Art Gallery invites visitors on a trip through the hazy environment of remembering and reintegration. The exhibition implies that the memory of a specific image is nothing but the result of longing for a specific moment. In addition, it follows the conflicted relationship between the time that goes on surrounding the moment we live in and the memory.
Memories, in fact, are the manipulated copies of reality; they are copies of the copies of the duplicated versions of the genuine image. Setting out to find the secret point when time stopped and our brain remembers and forgets, duplicating memory and shuffling it in a successive manner is a mysterious process. When it comes to remembering, on the other hand, it is an imaginary process of fiction.
Formulated in the present, some images are integrated with special bonds from the past. The scrappy and temporary images of the memory gain a holistic and consistent meaning when they are embraced concretely. Also, the production process of an artwork and it being concretely visible create a holistic and consistent image of the memory.
The exhibition approaches the experiences of the artists as the storage ability of the memory while approaching the memory of the work's production process as the remembering skill of memory. When it comes to the work itself, it is embraced as a concrete image of the present. As part of the exhibition, artists use various mediums as the initiators of sudden epiphanies of the past.
Eda Aslan's installation titled "Hatırlayamadığım Zamanlar" ("Times I Couldn't Remember") consists of 72 pieces of photographs taken by Fed 2, the first camera of the family. It presents weird, flyer pics that emerged as a result of a damaged film. Although the pics don't stand out clearly enough, they develop a silent dialogue with childhood, family, periods, stories and memory. Using the human body as the initiator of epiphanies, Eda Gecikmez concentrates on bodies that decorated their skin with landscapes. The artist dreams that those uprooted people record the past on their bodies instead of saving them within their memory. In other words, they transform their bodies into their memory, the artist dreams. Every single body is like the lost piece of a map. The venues resemble the interpenetrating backgrounds of the world of dreams. No matter how those venues are formed, you cannot speak of time while looking at them.
With her series "Holographic Recording," Güneş Terkol implies that our personal memories consist of various moments. What she wanted to reflect with her work is that a little while before and a little while after the moment and the projection of the instant change in memories. With the pictures of blank heads, she draws the posing figures on the flyer fabrics by using a sewing technique. On these overlapping layers, the work takes on a 3D image as a result of merging the two successive images.
The claustrophobia of timelessness created by the high technology that spins a cocoon of imaginary images stands as the representative of the artificial memory created in smartphones and carried around by people in Zeynep Beler's work. With a classical method of drawing frames, Beler puts pictures into a new cycle. With this technique, the artist who experiences the momentary frame for hours, captures the ghost images fictionalized by digital memory.
In the simplest terms, memory is a skill of recalling and recording. With references to past memories, the skill comes to the forefront in the present time. The style of remembering is a search rather than finding. While this search tries to find its own way throughout the generational reminiscences vanishing due to the nonstop energy of technological modernism and the passing of time, it goes on to work on the twilight status of the memory on the other hand.
Twilight is the moment that prioritizes the night of forgetting. In spite of that, it is the moment that acts as if it is slowing down time itself. It is a transition state through which the last light of the day presents its gorgeous show. It is the prioritized time of memory. As long as we have memories at this prioritized period of time, those memories will be changed or adorned in accordance with our contemporary knowledge.