New exhibition at Pera Museum

ISTANBUL

Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation Pera Museum presents the exhibition “PƎRⱯ Reverse” in collaboration with Bauhaus-Universität Weimar’s “Practices and Politics of Representation” class, led by Professor Mona Mahall with Yelta Köm and Hochschule für Künste Bremen’s “Temporary Spaces” class of Professor Aslı Serbest.

The exhibition brings together multiple perspectives on current art spaces and their urban neighborhoods in Istanbul, moving between high and popular cultures. Drawing upon two paintings within the Orientalist Painting Collection of the Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation, they explore global capitalist relations and localized cultural practices in art.

The exhibition also delves into the role of architecture in both establishing and revealing the ways in which institutions mediate and operate in relation to their urban environments in a place and time.

“PƎRⱯ Reverse” consists of three parts, entitled “Globals,” “Steps” and “Speculations.” In
“Globals,” adaptations of light signs, pools, a Guzmania plant, and the smell of detergent mimic and expose the global city as a ruin, while the low-hanging chandelier borrowed from the Pera Museum’s Art Deco café emphasizes the institution’s glamorous fragility.

“Steps” comprises the trauma that comes with the reality of representation, which fails to enact the world, or in this case, the complex and fragmented urban topography of the Pera area, full of different stairs and ramps. They make seem absurd the universalist dream of form and norm promoted by Bauhaus modernism in particular and a Westernized modernity in general, with its linear concepts of progress, the nation-state and the rigid politics of physical and metaphysical borders.

“Speculations” comments on the increasingly abstract and transnational processes of global economic, political and aesthetic speculation and valuation that perform violence differently –through ongoing operations of unequal exchange. By exploring the local non-profit art spaces and engaging cultural workers and visitors in a public program, the exhibition speculates on alternative values.

The exhibition can be seen through Aug. 18.