AVTO has gone back to its roots with its current show, "Static Shifts, Dynamic Rifts," the debut solo exhibition of Burak Kabadayı following his emergence at a small venue called Pasaj with a piece on time and fiction in collaboration with the children of the Tarlabaşı neighborhood. The work resembled the installation "The Clock" at Tate Modern by Swiss-American artist and composer Christian Marclay. His current focus on the mechanics of movement and its opposite through recreational car culture has brought him to the right place at AVTO.

Helmed by Sarp Özer, who studied curation while immersed in Milan’s art world before working at SALT and Arter as a researcher and writer of such intellectually riveting texts as the "Technopolitical Cookbook," AVTO has grown from well-tilled soil, fertilized by the peculiarly Italian fascination with the aesthetics of mechanical engineering, fired by working-class values and an enduring appreciation for neorealist sentiments. In its lair-like depths, AVTO is screening an array of videos that bridge the divide between art and industry.

Fixed in place with cavernous stalactites of twisted exhaust pipes, backlit with blue, purple and green artificial light, the videos of "Static Shifts, Dynamic Rifts" are color-coded to three themes: Circle, Straight and Oblique. In green, the motif of "Circle" is demonstrated by an especially skillful maneuver in which a car is whipped around in perfect cyclicality, turning on a moving axis that expands outward from a point to form a two-dimensional loop. From above and within the car, Kabadayı allows audiences to glimpse a day in the life of a "gear-head."

In America, the term "gearhead" is generally slapped onto anyone who spends their days in a garage, under the hood of automobiles with all of the know-how of where to tweak. Transmuted through the light of a video, the almost seamless repetition of the piece designated within the "Circle" theme has a resonance with its medium. The subversion of overpopulated society reduced to the consumption and reuse of mass-reproducible objects has an apt outlet in their conversion for nothing short of sheer amusement.

But whereas the art field is sometimes seen as a playground for elites, AVTO is bringing a touch of Italian modernism to Turkey’s cultural sector, vivifying the idea of social democracy not through conceptual metaphor masked in highfalutin decoration but through do-it-yourself utilitarian innovation, toward the experimentation of the industrial body. "Static Shifts, Dynamic Rifts" declares that artwork can smell like gasoline, it can growl, snarl and hum, speed off and turn back with the great equalizing force of global economic power.

Before the sound barrier

In her essay for the exhibition’s accompanying booklet, SALT curator Amira Akbıyıkoğlu compared Kabadayı’s documentation of automotive mobility to the dance choreography of Mehmet Sander. Akbıyıkoğlu implored readers to refer to Sander’s oeuvre, in which he saw bodies as pieces of logistical puzzles based on bewildering technical orders reconfigured, adjusted and progressing along fixed, sometimes confrontational lines. At the same time, as Akbıyıkoğlu points out, Sander, like Kabadayı, examined a wide range of physical possibilities.

That is particularly true under the blue light of a video in the "Straight" category at Kabadayı’s show. In the piece a car is burning rubber on the flatbed of a tow truck driving toward the horizon, bursting with a white cloud of smoke. Akbıyıkoğlu noted that Sander created a dance work titled, "Izafiyet" (Relativity), which, similarly, had four dancers performing on top of a truck. The environments in which these car stunts are enacted are as abstract as a stage, or canvas, and many were filmed in outlying manufacturing zones.

The localization of these externalized regions, largely unseen by the consumer class or unassimilated foreigners, is an essential part of the equation with respect to why and how such recreational activity is alluring and even significant. As much as these videos display a passion for what can be done with four interconnected wheels and an engine, they also reveal a need for the people interested in these machines to spread out and move in different ways than that prescribed by the default factory model cars.

By transforming the usage of what is the single most important public commodity to the authoritative economic establishment, these alternative car turners and stunt drivers are reclaiming their sense of direction, not only as a means of getting from one point to another but as a symbol of personal ingenuity, turning in, literally and visually, to become a spectacle of their separation from the norm, marking the territory of their subculture group with tire tracks. But despite their gritty appearance, they are conveying a whole symmetrically unto themselves.

Kabadayı has brought his remote sphere back to the center of cultural capital in downtown Istanbul. His gesture is merging the mentalities of both grease monkeys and armchair intellectuals. Another essayist who contributed to the exhibition is Deniz Kırkalı, whose piece, "Speed, Pleasure, Friction," begins by defining amateur driving communities as "micro gangs." In brief, Kırkalı found that the acts of automotive recreation at the core of Kabadayı’s exhibition were indicative of a search for pleasure in purposelessness.

At once finally gone

While it might be assumed that mechanical engineers, gear heads and grease monkeys are all undereducated young men just out for the sensation of speed and torque, there is a complexity to their masculine facade. As Kırkalı cleverly wrote in her essay, she saw the attention to friction as a veritable feminine gesticulation, which, by its indirectness can be seen as a performative comment on the nature of physical borders, of individuality and collectivity, and why their reconciliation is simultaneously gratifying, while equally maddening.

There is one video that is strikingly unique in "Static Shifts, Dynamic Rifts," flooded in purple light, it is part of the "Oblique" series of works, and shows two lateral wheels spinning edgewise against each other within the frame of a tire, creating an optical effect that is as hypnotizing as it is pleasant. It would be just as well to consider the parallel arrangements of motive geometries as a result of observing the tricks of "micro gangs." From the videos of Circle to Straight, their varying sources of movement are akin.

But by its definition, there is a perpendicularity to the Oblique videos that show how the appearance of movement is really a function of perspective. The question remains of what or who is actually moving at all, especially when the point of their recreational driving is not to go anywhere but to demonstrate something more essential, perhaps that cars are not what they appear to be, and that they are more like simple illusions of individual movement based on the fallacy that anything could be still in this moving world.