Arter welcomes summer with two new shows

ISTANBUL

Arter, a prominent art center in Istanbul’s Dolapdere district, is presenting two major art exhibitions this summer to delight art enthusiasts and fans of contemporary art.

One of them is a joint exhibition titled “Precaution,” featuring 13 works by 11 artists in the Arter Collection.

Bringing together the works of Hamra Abbas, Halil Altındere, Rogelio López Cuenca, Burak Delier, Lamia Joreige, Ali Kazma, Alicja Kwade, Serkan Özkaya, Walid Raad, Canan Tolon and Nasan Tur, the exhibition explores the preparation and negotiation processes the audience rarely witnesses; the power dynamics shaped by cultural, ideological, hierarchical, and economic contexts; as well as the weaknesses, sensitivities and fragilities particular to the field of art.

Curated by Emre Baykal, the exhibition focuses on practices of art production, preservation and exhibition through the works selected from the Arter Collection.

“All the works at the exhibition belong to the Arter Collection,” Baykal said during a recent press conference.

“Being presented at a time when the pace of daily life, our social relations, our modes of work and the distances between us and the world have changed, our range of movement has been limited and even our physical appearance has been masked, ‘Precaution’ takes its name from Canan Tolon’s work,” he added.

[HH] Füsun Onur’s new installation artwork

The second exhibition at Arter features an installation art titled “Opus II – Fantasia” by Füsun Onur, one of the pioneers of contemporary art in Turkey.

“Opus II – Fantasia” carries references to music, as is the case with many of her works.

In the installation, she uses four ordinary objects as the medium and elements of music, interpreting space and time through rhythm and variations. The forms and motifs, which emerge from the rhythmic appearances of and encounters between the white knitting needles, balls of gold braid, small porcelain figurines and standard museum plinths, proliferate and vary with pauses and crescendos, composing visual music that makes reference to and rearranges the exhibition space.

“Deploying everyday, fictional, and even autobiographical elements to explore form, space, time, and the relations among them through an exceptional variety of materials, Füsun Onur approaches music as a process that engages multiple senses,” Baykal said.

“Opus II – Fantasia” was conceived by Onur in 2001 for the exhibition “From Far Away So Close” at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden–Baden. The artist then created different rearrangements of the work for the group exhibitions “Tactics of Invisibility” (2011) at Arter and “Border of Time” at Neues Museum Nürnberg.

Onur is currently preparing a new work for the Pavilion of Turkey for the 59th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, which will be held in 2022.

Both the exhibitions will remain on display at Arter until Feb. 20, 2022.