Beste Erener / Mehmet Çeper
Curator: Mahmut Wenda Koyuncu
Beste Erener and Mehmet Çeper pass through valid, legal, legitimate language (reason, thought, naturalized and historicized design) and address the critics of two different fields but the same historical political perception. Pointing out the impossibility of creating another perception without understanding nature, without criticizing the burden of cultural and historical human heritage, the artists try to show that the domination of humans over each other cannot be stopped without addressing the meta language and position that humans adopt against nature. They build a critique of the existence of these different fields of perception and sensation for the Reasonable Sacrifice exhibition. The artists use digital tools to attempt to establish the intersection points of today's painful ways with the universe that humankind built with sense, perception, sensation or emotion in the pre-linguistic universe. Pointing out the impossibility of creating another perception without understanding nature, without criticizing the burden of cultural and historical human heritage, the artists try to show that the domination of humans over each other cannot be stopped without addressing the meta language and position that humans adopt against nature. They build a critique of the existence of these different fields of perception and sensation for the Reasonable Sacrifice exhibition. The artists use digital tools to attempt to establish the intersection points of today's painful ways with the universe that humankind built with sense, perception, sensation or emotion in the pre-linguistic universe.
Beste Erener, in the images she visualizes based on an Anatolian lullaby, shows the pain of inhibiting the human desire to integrate with the wild. By constructing strange environments with nightmare-like unconscious oscillations, the artist alienates human and nature from each other, depicting existential troubles that the desire for integration will have difficulty in expressing in the relationship between human and nature by language/culture/reason. Drawing parallels between Freud's 'Werewolf' case and a folk song in Anatolia, Erener places Deleuze's concept of becoming-animal, developed against Freud, under the mute nature (the bear in the folk song). Mehmet Çeper looks for ways to deal with the nature-culture distinction, environmental and political current issues by engaging in dialogue with water with his videos and installations. Starting from the simple but vital effects of water on people, Çeper uses the fluidity, transparency and evaporation properties of water as an experimental form of his artistic works.
He exposes the futility of political rivalries in a world turned into a desert by global warming and ecological disasters, or of policies of exclusion, exploitation, cultural or linguistic assimilation in the face of reality. He shows the destitute story of the weakness and volatility of this perception in the face of given perceptions, with its fleeting effects on the soil or nature, and how it turns into a sentence that is lost while it is being written and cannot be completed.
A way of thinking that instantly evaporates and becomes susceptible to sacrifice.
The exhibition can be viewed at Kasa Galeri between 09:00 – 17:00 on weekdays until 31 December 2021. Due to pandemic measures, HES Code and proof of vaccination must be presented at the entrance.
MAHMUT WENDA KOYUNCU is a member of UNESCO's AICA (International Association of Art Critics). After graduating from the Teaching Faculty of Dicle University, he completed his Master's Degree in General Sociology and Methodology at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University. After his dissertation on 'Identity and Representation in Contemporary Art', he could not finish his PhD program in International Relations and Political Science at Yıldız Technical University. In 2015, he made a feature-length documentary titled “1 in a Million” on the situation of Armenians in Derikli and their place in the memory of Kurds from Derikli. He provided copywriting, consultancy and curation support to various exhibitions with the theme of human rights and democracy. Since 2002, he has written articles on art, politics and culture for newspapers such as Radikal, Taraf, Agos, Birgün and for magazines such as Artist and RH+. He still writes occasional articles for internet magazines such as Sanatatak, Post Dergi, Artunlimited and works as an independent curator.
BESTE ERENER graduated from Marmara University Fine Arts Faculty painting department in 2003 and from Vienna Applied Arts University digital arts department in 2018. The artist's work has been displayed in many national and international platforms such as Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts, Aksanat, Kasa Galeri, XI Biennial of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean, MAP, das weisse haus, Mz Baltazar's Lab, Klangmanifeste. Since 2014, she has been producing with Blender, an open source 3D computer graphics program. She also took place in social/participatory art projects such as “8Bit”, which took place within amberPlatform and with Tahribad-ı İsyan in 2013, “One Song Project” organized by Stand 129 in 2014, and “Welcome to the Living Room” with Migrationlab in 2015. She has been working as a part-time lecturer at Yaşar University since 2018.
MEHMET ÇEPER criticizes and questions all the arguments of the macro-commandatory language of social issues with the "language of not being one", and while questioning these structures, he adopts a thought that deconstructs them "with the nothingness of oneness". Çeper defines this situation as the search for “a complicity” within his aesthetic regime. He produces productions that leave out the language pattern that imposes the necessity in social issues, allow the audience to look at this chain of events in a different way, and render solid indicators permeable with a kind of game logic. The permeability in the artist's works is in the distributive role of the relational codes of social realism. The artist underlines that the human potential, which has turned into an ecological destruction with these codes and a resistant structure, has become some form of power practice. He realistically approaches the individual's efforts to prevent his stance in the face of this potential and the inadequacy of this effort, the deadlocks created by inadequacy, and the situations of crossing borders. Mehmet Çeper's entropy is the art of twisted deductions and scrambled identities. Using photography, videoart, installation and new media techniques, he employs concepts such as border, militarism, spontaneous consciousness, random processes, bureaucratic desire, and lack of origin in his productions. Among the exhibitions he has participated in are ''1st Mardin Biennial'' Mardin 2010, ''Where the fire fell'' DEPO Istanbul 2011, ''Which side does Diyarbakir prison fall on'' Karşı art works Istanbul 2011, ''100% peace'' Adasanat Istanbul 2011, '' A "museum" within the museum Proje4L Elgiz contemporary art museum Istanbul 2012, "Terror of reality" DEPO Istanbul 2012, "Atopos" Versus Art Project Istanbul 2018.
