Beril Or and Ece Yalçın's exhibition Thank You for Your Time will take place at Minerva Han Kasa Gallery from November 21, 2024, to January 3, 2025. In collaboratively conceptualizing the exhibition between Istanbul and San Francisco, the artists inevitably center their works on the idea of time due to the time differences. This exhibition highlights the variations in their artistic practices within this thematic framework.
Drawing from the fact that Minerva Han was once a bank, artists reinterpret the physical memory of the place through time and value systems. While the works offer a glimpse into the artists' own practices, they provide the opportunity to read them through the concepts of art production and time management, working hours and ways of evaluating time, boundaries of public spaces, value, and uncertainty.
Beril Or is interested in how capitalism manipulates our perception of time and, in response, repositions our relationship with it. By separating time from its function of measuring labor, Or disrupts conventional timekeeping methods. While reimagining how these units have varied across cultures throughout history from a contemporary perspective, she reflects on the dynamics of her own art practice, focusing on dualities such as stillness/motion, working/resting, and countability/uncountability.
Ece Yalçın, on the other hand, activates the waiting area inside the bank. Undefined time periods in daily life, the stress of uncertainty, and actions that need to be done rapidly without much thought are included in Yalçın's line of work. Yalçın embodies some moments that are difficult to measure, situations that are hard to define while expressing them with "waiting" objects in spaces that require inertia. She replicates the details of the cash desk on the ground floor of the building, and the adornments around it, and places them in the bank's former safe, which now serves as the Kasa Gallery. Thus, by moving the public semi-public structures within the building, she displaces the semantics of the space.
Thank You for Your Time initiates a discussion on the productivity dogma imposed by the late capitalist world by offering alternatives to conventional value and measurement systems. It also emphasizes the artists' work to concretize ambiguous concepts such as the uncertain and passive act of waiting, as well as the relativity of time. The works of Beril Or and Ece Yalçın can be seen at Kasa Gallery until January 3, 2025.
Beril Or (b. 1987, Ankara) explores time, memory, and healing through rest, moving between comfort and disturbance. She has exhibited nationally and internationally at galleries and projects such as CIAM, Marin MOCA, Your Mood Projects, /Slash/room/, SOMArts, Root Division, Berkeley Art Center, Palo Alto Art Center, ICASF, SOEX, Galeri Nev, Zilberman Gallery, Mamut Art Projects 5, and 38. Akbank Contemporary Artists. She received the State Sculpture Award in Turkey in 2009 and the Cadogan Contemporary Art Award in 2019, Sher-Right Award in 2021 among others. She is a co-founder of San Francisco based three-person curatorial collective, MUZ, dedicated to supporting emerging artists. She holds an MFA in Art Practice from San Francisco State University and a BFA in Sculpture from Hacettepe University. Currently, she teaches sculpture at City College of San Francisco and lives and works in Oakland, California.
Ece Yalçın (b. 1995, Istanbul) reorganizes in situ materials and forms through mediums. Her work has been shown in Mamut Art Project (2024), Capriola Art Week, Italy (2023), and Borderless Artbook Days at Arter, Istanbul (2023). Selected exhibitions include her MA thesis exhibition, Material Relocated (2024), Occupation at Barın Han (2023) and Broken Octave at 5533, Istanbul (2022). She began her BFA in Fine Arts at the School of Visual Arts, NYC (2013-2016), and completed her BA in Visual Arts at Işık University, Istanbul (2020). Yalçın holds a Master’s in Visual Arts from Sabancı University (2023).
*T. Melis Golar’s text accompanies the exhibition
