Alparslan Baloğlu's most comprehensive retrospective exhibition to date, curated by Azra Tüzünoğlu, is displayed at the Troy Museum as part of the eighth Çanakkale Biennial, and it will run until Nov. 5. The two-phased exhibition, where Baloğlu's 45 years of experience as well as his installation that he attempts to read Troy from today's perspective, meets art lovers in the corridors of the redolent Troy Museum.
His exhibition, "Horses, Gods and Others," was also displayed in the museum as part of the culture road project in Çanakkale.
Working closely with the artist, the curator Tüzünoğlu brings together his rarely or never seen works as a result of her detailed research on the artist's life and practice. The exhibition aims to highlight the artist's creations and creative projects that can be regarded as the milestones of the period handled by the artists in the 70s and 80s. Through the effort, the exhibition strives to make a contribution to the memory of Turkish art history through a retrospective lens.
Alparslan Baloğlu Retrospective collects the works and documents from the artist's own archive, his close friends such as Serhat Kiraz and Ahmet Öktem and corporate digital archives such as SALT Research, as well as the works and documents uncovered as a result of Tüzünoğlu's research on master's and doctoral theses. This kind of study exhibition can be regarded as the first for both the artist and Turkish art history.
Troy, Here and Now
Baloğlu's "Horses, Gods and Others" exhibition features installations, consisting of aphorisms, establishing a historical link between the present and the past through a lightning globe in which you can say hello to Zeus or horseshoe traces in bare soil as a nod to the Trojan Horse. The artist's efforts to reread "Troy" as a myth and/or historical reality.
Presenting one of the most striking and mysterious legends of world history, the artist Alparslan Baloğlu seeks new answers to questions about the legend in the temporary exhibition area of the Troy Museum, where the ground is covered with earth, on the battlefield where the traces of horseshoes, one of the most important forces in the war, are found. This long story of the Trojan War, which is a tale told in antiquity still in the present in the land where the legend was born through Baloğlu's installations.
The first installation with the aphorism "Was Zeus and the others both aftermath, the reason and the epithet of enunciation of a justification?" consists of rats placed on soil and refers to a story in Homer's "Iliad." Accordingly, the commander Agamemnon abducted the daughter of Apollo's priest. After wishing for his daughter's return from Apollo, the Sun god sent the plague to Agamemnon's army with many rodents, which caused Apollo to be dubbed the "Lord of Mice."