American conceptual artist and collagist Barbara Kruger's 1985 dated "Your Body is a Battleground" piece, showing a woman’s face, disembodied, split into positive and negative exposures, carried a direct message of freedom for women.

Similarly, the exhibition that carries the same name as Kruger's aphorism, formed by the Agah Uğur Collection, features nearly 50 works by more than 40 artists from Türkiye and the world to shed light on many issues. The exhibition, curated by Mardin-born contemporary artist Halil Altındere, aims to highlight the societal issues of struggle, freedom, borders, migration and memory.

As the CEO of the giant Turkish industrial group Borusan, Agah Uğur's collection, created with social and intellectual sensitivity, contains works that question the future, past and present, looking at society and time. In this way, Uğur establishes a wide-spectrum world in which he includes works by contemporary artists from different periods from Türkiye, as well as works by important artists from nearby geographies.

By embodying the description of Shakespeare that "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players," curator Halil Altındere unfurls wild scenes in the exhibition, evoking the one to question reality through the most "disregarded" people and subjects.

"The glance caught between hunter and prey suspends the binary oppositions between guilty and innocent, life and death. In the scene where the light is not stable, it is also a matter that the light does not show as much as it does. In this context, the exhibition questions how a link can be established between "seeing" and the actual reality," Uğur explained about the exhibition.

"In an age where the eye prevails over the ear, can humanity, looking at each other through the lenses of social media, screens and cameras, see "everything" and believe that what they see is "real"? Through this exhibition, we invite the visitors to a 660 square meter stage, in other words, battleground," Uğur added.

According to Uğur, the artworks that are hard to understand at a first look yet have an effective message that is exciting as it makes the audience think, provoke, and offer a glance at history and today's issues with a different perspective. For that reason, Barbara Kruger's art style should be seen as the starting point in the process of naming the exhibition. As Kruger employs text and imagery to highlight the structures of control and how they are insidiously interwoven with our everyday life, she aims to convey her ideas and statements with ordinary and ephemeral objects.

"As for 'Your Body is a Battleground,' the works in the collection are a bit unusual, they are not the works that everyone to pay for, but when they come together, I think they do well in their task of influencing the audience and making them think in a different way. I felt it was a chance to hold this exhibition in such a magnificent building and at a time when so many cultural events are happening in Istanbul. Then I thought about who could undertake this mission, and that made me consider working with Halil Altındere, the artist who, beyond our friendship, is known for his extraordinary style, also curating very good independent exhibitions," Uğur explained about the exhibition.

The exhibition will host its visitors until Oct. 31 and is located on the second and third floors of the Alexandre Vallaury building in Istanbul's Beyoğlu district.