Exhibitions Releases

Unseen Works from the Borusan Contemporary Art Collection on View at Perili Köşk With Three New Exhibitions

20 February 2017 Mon

The most prominent center in Istanbul for new media art, Borusan Contemporary welcomes the spring with three new exhibitions, mostly unveiling works from the Borusan Collection that were never seen before.

The most prominent center in Istanbul for new media art, Borusan Contemporary welcomes the spring with three new exhibitions, mostly unveiling works from the Borusan Collection that were never seen before. The exhibitions, Overture: New Acquisitions from the Borusan Contemporary Art Collection, Ola Kolehmainen: Sinan Project and Remains of the Days, which will open on March 4, 2017, can be visited at Perili Köşk until September 3, 2017.

Borusan Contemporary will host three important exhibitions starting March 4, 2017. Overture: New Acquisitions from the Borusan Contemporary Art Collection, curated by Borusan’s Artistic Director-at-Large Kathleen Forde, is made up of works in the collection that were recently acquired and have not yet been on display. This exhibition is the second in the ongoing series Overture initiated in November 2014 and presents a selection of recent accessions not previously on view in the special exhibition galleries at Borusan Contemporary. The choice of works also functions as a representative snapshot of the geographic, esthetic and genre based initiatives of Borusan’s recent collecting activities. The works range from digitized landscapes and newly commissioned videos to virtual reality works and interactive portraits. Artists include Angela Bulloch, U-ram Choe, Chris Doyle, Kurt Hentschlager, Ali Kazma, Rachel Rossin, Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneu.

Ola Kolehmainen: Sinan Project, curated by Necmi Sönmez, will welcome art enthusiasts on the fourth floor of Borusan Contemporary. Known for his abstract work and recognized as one of the leading figures in international contemporary photography, Ola Kolehmainen’s Sinan Project approaches intercultural dialogue with a contemporary interpretation, though it is primarily focused on the masterpieces of Byzantine and Ottoman architecture.

Remains of the Days, also curated by Necmi Sönmez, explores the interesting relationship between contemporary art and time and presents a selection of works from the Borusan Contemporary Art Collection. This relationship is often approached very differently in new media art, which could be defined as “time-based media”. Stemming from the tradition of exhibitions rooted in literary writings, such as those based on the works of Leylâ Erbil and Tezer Özlü, the conceptual framework of Remains of the Days is based on the fictional world which the unparalleled author Tomris Uyar created.

Overture: New Acquisitions from the Borusan Contemporary Art Collection

In this exhibition, mostly made up of video works, Chris Doyle focuses on the links between plant life and pattern, ornament, design, and construction, it is about the tension between creative and destructive impulses. As we transition from industrial to digital culture, civilization continues to generate huge amounts of waste.

Kurt Hentschläger’s video work Measure is part of an emerging body of work, which reflects on concepts of nature in the 21st century. As nature filtered through digital communications channels becomes the new norm, the boundaries start to blur between mediated and physical experience. Hentschläger’s work probes the question whether “nature” and the “original” can still culturally exist in the Anthropocene, in this age of human influence.

Ali Kazma’s latest work Subterranean, commissioned by the Borusan Contemporary Art Collection, attempts to explore the potential of existence and the possibilities of movement for human beings by tracing the process of energy production.

Rachel Rossin’s work, I Came And Went As A Ghost Hand, Cycle I, extends the loss of information, derived from the term entropy used in data encoding, to every moment and part of our lives, and as the artist puts it, “this exhibition posits that our relationship with reality isn't comprised of a separate virtual and real but looks more like a gradient between the two”.

Angela Bulloch’s work spans many forms, but they all manifest her interest in systems, patterns and rules, and the creative territory between mathematics and aesthetics. One of her works that will be displayed in the exhibition, Copper Stack 4 uses her most familiar component, pixel boxes. Her works fabricated in copper, aluminium or corian pay closer homage to their minimalist heritage, while the colours they channel are freed from their earlier origins to become pure abstraction.

Christa Sommer and Laurent Mignonneu’s interactive computer installation, Portrait on the Fly a series of plotter drawings as well. Ephemeral moments of interaction are thereby immortalized in the form of graphical drawings.

U-Ram Choe’s work, Una Lumino Portentum, combine delicate, otherworldly beauty with machines, motors, and steel, just like his other complex kinetic sculptures. In this series of work that includes Una Lumino Portentum, U-Ram explores the creation of mechanized sentient creatures that operate within communities.

Ola Kolehmainen: Sinan Project

Recognized as one of the leading figures in international contemporary photography, Ola Kolehmainen (1964, Helsinki) is known for his abstract work. The artist’s work, with which he made a name for himself within the Helsinki School of Photography, were acquired by the Borusan Contemporary Art Collection in 2010 and put on display in Perili Köşk in 2012. Later, between 2012–2014 with Borusan Contemporary’s special commission, Kolehmainen started working on Mimar Sinan, producing a series of large, colored photographs that take on the great architect’s work with the Byzantine architectural tradition, which was a major influence on Sinan. All of them printed using the diasec technique in Düsseldorf, the project introduces a creative aesthetic interpretation that approaches the context of Mimar Sinan’s architecture from unseen perspectives.

Sinan Project approaches intercultural dialogue with a contemporary interpretation due to its dynamics, though it is primarily focused on the masterpieces of Byzantine and Ottoman architecture. The artist underscores an interdisciplinary interaction with his unique interpretation of art that showcases the elements of color and form. This reveals the multicultural character of Istanbul along with how contemporary art can form a creative dialog with this tradition. Placing Sinan’s three dimensional architectural construction into his own aesthetics of photography, Kolehmainen succeeds in emphasizing an intense “spiritual integrity” between the past and the present while approaching the holy spaces that have been photographed numerous times in the past from different perspectives.

Working in Berlin, Kolehmainen focuses on the transformation of forms in Sinan Project. This series emphasizes the use of light by approaching the rapprochement between the Byzantine and Ottoman architectures from an aesthetic perspective instead of a functional one. The artist, who did a thorough research on the effect of daylight in the spaces he will photograph, reveals the humanist values in the core of Sinan’s architecture, by focusing on dynamic details in his work that ascertains how light transform the aggregate forms of architecture.

Remains of the Days

Exploring the interesting relationship between contemporary art and time, Remains of the Days is a selection of works from the Borusan Contemporary Art Collection. This relationship is often approached very differently in new media art, which could be defined as “time-based media”. The Borusan Contemporary Art Collection, which is the first comprehensive new media collection of its kind in Turkey, traces the immediate sources of contemporary art both with its exhibitions and other events it organizes. The exhibition, Remains of the Days, questions the effects of the times and processes we live in on creative art, by looking at different aesthetic concerns.

Stemming from the tradition of exhibitions rooted in literary writings, such as those based on the work of Leylâ Erbil and Tezer Özlü, the conceptual framework of Remains of the Days is based on the fictional world of the unparalleled author Tomris Uyar. Keeping journals along with her fictional writing, Uyar was able to look at the mundane phenomena surrounding her from different perspectives. With her books that establish keeping journals is a creative form on its own, Uyar focused on the momentary transformations of emotions that were shaped by time. Remains of the Days aims at sparking discussion on the stance of contemporary art toward current phenomena.

The exhibition, in which new acquisitions will also be shown, will be accompanied by a series of events that are inspired by Tomris Uyar’s books.

The exhibitions will be on view until the evening of September 3, 2017.