Art Basel Miami Beach hosts Turkish artists

ISTANBUL - Hürriyet Daily News

The Art Positions sector, a platform for a major project by a new talent, will showcase ‘Archival Digest, 2012’ by Aslı Cavuşoğlu. In this series of works Cavuşoğlu turns her eye to the Turkish modernization period in the late 19th century.

The world’s most respected art dealers are offering exceptional pieces by both renowned artists and cutting-edge newcomers in Miami Beach, Florida at the 11th edition of Art Basel. This year Rampa Art Gallery and Non Art Gallery will be in Miami showing an exclusive collection, and Taner Ceylan will be presenting his Esma Sultan portrait with the Paul Kasmin gallery.

Special exhibition sections will feature young galleries, performance art, public art projects and video art Dec. 6 through 9. The show will be a vital source for art lovers, allowing them to both discover new developments in contemporary art and experience rare museum-caliber artworks.

More than 260 leading galleries from North America, Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa will take part, showcasing works by more than 2,000 artists of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Gallery Non with Aslı Çavuşoğlu

The Art Positions sector, a platform for a major project by an ambitious new talent, will showcase “Archival Digest, 2012” by Aslı Cavuşoğlu. In this series of works Cavuşoğlu turns her eye to the Turkish modernization period in the late 19th century and the willed state of amnesia that followed, as the population turned its back not only on a recent past typified by the decline of the Ottoman Empire and its customs, but also the rejection of its alphabet as well – thus estranging its archives through a newfound illegibility.

Cavuşoğlu will translate NON’s Art Basel Miami booth, through an installation of interrelated works, into a kind of ghost library or archive paralleling how subjectivities and their related identities were constructed and reconstructed through this period and in Turkey today. We are introduced to this complex modernization project as Cavuşoğlu explores the hidden layers of history as well as the possibility of its suppression through excerpting various pedagogical diagrams from Turkish national history textbooks, as well as recycling the “leftover” remains of the resource books into a set of nesting tables.

The effacement of history is further explored in the artist’s works dealing with Ottoman jewelry archives, images of which are produced as photograms, resulting in only the empty, blank shapes of the jewels, rendering them mere outlines completely divorced from their former context of social prestige. Rather than acting as evidence of the preservation or appreciation of the past, they now convey a heightened sense of absence, loss and nostalgia. Rampa will feature works by a mixture of artists including Bengü Karaduman, Servet Koçyiğit, Nilbar Güreş and Erinç Seymen.

Live performances

Art Public is turning Collins Park into an outdoor exhibition space for the second year running with large-scale sculpture, video, installation and live performances. Produced in collaboration with the Bass Museum of Art, the Art Basel Miami Beach sector includes works from the show’s galleries, by leading and emerging international artists, installed from the ground level within the park to flying along the Miami Beach skyline above. Selected for the second consecutive year by Christine Y. Kim, associate curator of contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and cofounder of the Los, this year’s edition of Art Public features a series of works grounded.