Exhibitions Releases

“What Lies Beneath” Guests are at Borusan Contemporary!

5 October 2015 Mon

Borusan Contemporary will contribute two new exhibitions to the dynamic momentum of the İstanbul art scene in September with the opening of the 14th Istanbul Biennial!
The exhibitions entitled “What Lies Beneath” and “Desire” will take place between September 5, 2015 until February 21, 2016.

What Lies Beneath

Curator: Christiane Paul

The exhibition  “What Lies Beneath”  strives to capture one of the current conditions of our culture: an atmosphere of increasing alienation and decaying trust resulting from factors that often lie beneath the surface of the visible. The show comprises three room-size installations — Michal Rovner, Krzysztof Wodiczko   and  Zimoun —   that create a contemplative space for reflecting on cultural and social conditions and visceral forces that may not be easily perceivable and create feelings of uncertainty.

The world is currently witnessing a momentous period of instability and conflict, leading to existential forms of alienation for individuals. The systems and forces creating these conditions are often difficult to understand in their complexities, which generate feelings of insecurity and a fear of the “other,” be it an individual, ethnic or religious group or a circumstance such as persecution or poverty.

The works in the exhibition invite the audience to ponder the complexities of systems and the human condition that remain beneath the surface. Krzysztof Wodiczko's large-scale video projection  Guests  consists of projected windows that display a slightly blurry view of immigrants from countries around the world, raising concerns on the quality of their life. In Michal Rovner's  Broken Time (2009), Untitled 4 (Panorama) (2015) and Untitled 19 (Panorama)  the movements of tiny human figures become 'human marks', a hieroglyphic text that reflects on migration and disruptions, as well as relationships between time and space and their legibility. Zimoun's site-specific installation  240 prepared dc-motors, cardboard boxes 60x20x20 cm  (2013/2015) consists of a room full of tall, standing cardboard boxes that move and shake driven by ominous forces, thereby creating a sound architecture that invites the audience to contemplate the complexity of its environment.

Christiane Paul is an Associate Professor in the School of Media Studies at The New School, and Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.

Desire

Curator: Dr. Necmi Sönmez

The exhibition  “Desire”   presents a selection from the Borusan Contemporary Art Collections recent acquisitions with new commissioned site-specific-installations. The presentation focus on a dialogue with the themes of lust and desire in order to interpret visual images of art works with help of poetry and fiction. The selection, invites the audience to create an alternative model of interpretation and present opportunities for homogenous readings on different art works with exhilarating and surprising installations and juxtapositions.

The Borusan Contemporary collection is the first corporate collection dedicated to the New Media Art and moving image in Turkey. The exhibition offer the viewer an opportunity to establish links between the selections from the collection with eminent works by artists from different generations such as Dominic Harris, Martin Walde, Rick Silva, Lale Delibaş, Shilpa Gupta, Zeynep Beler, Erdal İnci and Ola Kolehmainen. In this manner, the show presents different vertical and horizontal relationships within Borusan Contemporary in a way to observe and reflect the characteristics of Perili Köşk’s architecture. The exhibition features the site-specific work  034 Urban Songline | Latitude: 41.041250° N - 41.041345° N / Longitude: 28.990245° E - 28.990331° E (Water Score)   by Allard van Hoorn, reflecting the sounds of the Bosphorus on the floors of Perili Köşk, which is recently added to the collection.

Dr. Necmi Sönmez is an independent curator and art historian living in Düsseldorf.

You can download the press kit