Artists of two cities join for exhibition

ISTANBUL – Hürriyet Daily News

The first part of the artist exchange project ‘31 Kilos’ took place in Istanbul’s The Space, a temporary exhibition space in Tophane neighborhood.

A number of German artists will soon be in Istanbul for an exhibition as part of an exchange project that aims to build cultural dialogue between Istanbul and Dortmund.

Initiated on April 4, the project exhibition “31 Kilos” will open today in Istanbul and continue until May 15.

Artists Uygar Demoğlu, Sümer Sayın, Can Kurucu, Özgür Demirci, Daniel Burkhardt, Daniela Löbbert, Patrick Presch and David Kröll participated in the project with the support of the curatorial team of Denise Winter, Samira Yıldırım, Mehmet Kahraman and Serhat Cacekli.

The first part of the project took place in Istanbul’s The Space, a temporary exhibition space located on the second floor of an old office building waiting to be rebuilt in order to serve as a hotel in the Tophane neighborhood.

Carrying 31 kilos

In recent years, artists in Istanbul and Dortmund have been following a similar trajectory in contemporary art. Both cities are becoming the new cultural centers of Europe with the emergence of new cultural areas. In the first part of “31 Kilos,” four German artists came to Turkey and worked with four Turkish artists.

The same artists will carry out the second part of the project between September and November this year at the Künstlerhaus Dortmund.

According to the German Post, each artist was only allowed to send or carry 31 kilograms of material and/or artwork to the exhibition area, as this is part of travel restrictions.

As part of the rules, artists were given permission to prepare a box with the maximum limits of 120 x 60 x 60 cm and 31 kilograms to send to Istanbul with standard shipping.

In this project, artists will lend a new architectural identity to the venue of exhibition, which was not originally designed for exhibitions.

In most exhibitions, installations are completed art objects, but the content of “31 Kilos” has been constructed in a more flexible way.