Art Initiative: OPEN SPACE – HASAN ÖZGÜR TOP

Art Initiative: OPEN SPACE

24TH SEPTEMBER – 29TH SEPTEMBER 2019
OPENING: 23RD SEPTEMBER, 5 PM – 9 PM
Link

PROJECT CURATORS: GÜLSEN BAL & WALTER SEIDL »

PARTICIPATING ARTIST:
TURAN AKSOY
ELENA COLOGNI
ELVEDIN KLAČAR
HASAN ÖZGÜR TOP

Venue: PARALLEL VIENNA’ 19
Lassallestraße 5
1020 Vienna

Coincide with Vienna Contemporary Art Fair at the Marx-Halle.

This program designates the inter-relationship between creative practice and divergent lines of encounters, which is to be presented within Open Space programme in an engagement of creating a discursive platform for a variety of reflections of potential critical dialogues to facilitate new kinds of creative connections.

TURAN AKSOY
DEPLASMAN/DISPLACEMENT, 2019
Artist book, mixed media, 29×26 cm

The focus of Turan Aksoy’s work takes up the notions of neoliberal politics that shape virtually every area of our daily lives, covering the issues of degraded distance between individual and communal life as well as the ability to objectively view this effect. His artistic position is determined by the events from his own life, experienced events and social norms that are personalized, politicized, abstracted from time to time, made erotic and/ or sarcastic; weaving into them metaphors and/ or surreal elements through a multidisciplinary approach, using different media which he believes is necessary at the stage of producing his thoughts.
This book is about things and their places. It is also about who “we are”, of course, as the deliberate buyers, choosers and placers of those things. And this is also about “you”. It is “you” and “us” and “our” convictions that determine their place or find it odd. It is also about vain statesmen. They are the ones who change the places of objects, and thus their meaning so that we get used to their bullshit or at least do not find it odd.

ELENA COLOGNI
39282.580645 BARLEYCORNS AWAY, 2017
Installation: collages on paper, oak shelves and fabric. 270×250 cm

Working at the intersection of ‘dialogics’, ‘feministics’ and ecologies, Elena Cologni’s ecofeminist position is grounded in care ethics. She considers the term caring in the sense of hands-on “caring for”, then in the emotional and ethical sense of “caring about”, and in the context of the dialogic strategy adopted in her artistic practice: “caring with.” This is rooted in her day-to-day experience of relating to new places and people from different cultures and backgrounds. Her installation work 39282.580645 Barleycorns Away… indicates home as an ideal place, very far away, but also in our memories, and always here. This is also the manifestation of what can be considered as a form of relational, spatialised and situated art, from an ecofeminist perspective. It is concerned with various strategies and modes of ‘being’ with, listening to, and caring for others in relation to place. Cologni’s work defines a geography of difference through caring in its relation to the everyday social experience of public space as dialogic. Particularly this indicates a certain artistic strategy towards the ecology of dialogues developed from a two-faceted interest where we recognize mutual sets of interdependence and interconnections both within us (binding the cognitive to the emotional), and between us.

ELVEDIN KLAČAR
TERRITORIAL RE-STRUCTURING, 2018
Mixed media installation, 120 x 120 cm

Elvedin Klačar creates spaces which offer possibilities of confrontation. His installations are mostly performative and engage visitors in communication. The intensifying global relations addressed in his work force us to act or react as well as to rethink the conditions of space, which are mostly manipulated and no longer pure or pristine. The artist hints at the fact that mere existence is not given but has become an increasing factor that needs attention in order to keep up with progress. His in-situ works often surprise viewers through their ironizing quality when dealing with the reality at hand. In the presented work, he mixes materials of progress and history into an overall visual pattern, which literally or radically cements life. In the past, asphalt was meant to be a connotation for progress, industry and a sign of “modern man.” Through the narrowing of spaces and the exploitation of the sea, human existence has been put into danger. Asphalting corals denotes a critical stance towards “true capital.”

HASAN ÖZGÜR TOP
THE ATELIER, 2018
Single channel video, 18 min.

The Atelier takes the viewer to a specific Turkish flag manufacturing shop in Istanbul; where the audience is introduced to a few workers making fags amidst their employers. What starts as a tour of the technical process at a modest workshop unfolds into an age-old practice of transforming a simple piece of fabric into a sacred symbol. In this work Hasan Özgür Top takes the pulse of popular opinion by making visible this small, independent company’s foreign trade relations. A subtle yet important shift exposes economic ties with the Kurdistan Democratic Party, the Kurdish party in Iraq, even though supporting Iraqi Kurds stands against Turkish nationalist ideals. The Atelier also brings to light the use of a growing Syrian workforce. These contradictions stand as examples in Turkey where loyalty to nationhood is superseded by capitalism, which is the most recent tipping point in current social and political conditions globally.