Young artist’s exhibition reveals moments of life
ISTANBUL - Hürriyet Daily News
Working with various media such as kinetic installations, drawing and animation, artist Sümer Sayın is focusing in her new exhibition on probability. Company photo
Working with various media such as kinetic installations, drawing and animation, artist Sümer Sayın is focusing in her new exhibition on the moments when the concepts of indefiniteness, probability, relativity and hope intersect.Sayın’s works are “fluid” and make the viewer feel like they are moving all the time. They depict the concept of indefiniteness.
“Only for a moment can my works have a definite saying, but the content is still indefinite and the entire process is a continuously changing and never-ending one. In the piece ‘EVER,’ we never know if the letters will align. In ‘YES,’ until the quick moment of seeing the word, we don’t even know what we expect,” she said during a recent interview with the Hürriyet Daily News.
Reconsidering the mental probabilities that indefiniteness creates, she deconstructs systems, thus allowing for the rise of new perceptions within the process. However, pondering such probabilities may sometimes be delusional but also hope-inducing at other times.
The dilemma is another focus of her works. With the dilemma, Sayın also considers the balance as some sort of an equation which could be reformulated under different circumstances rather than a constant position and explores fragility in the process of reconstruction.
“Hope” with the dilemma and its nature opens a new dimension in the understanding process of the works.
“Hope lies in the process of waiting when the future is unknown. If we knew what we would get, hope would not exist. So, expectation does not really give us hope, but rather not knowing the future makes us create scenarios. Mine are directed toward a happy end, but the timing of ‘the end’ is unstable and volatile. This is, indeed, what makes the process more important,” she said.
Sayın’s interest in astrophysics, as well as in other disciplines and areas such as music, philosophy and literature, led her through her art career.
“In all these different disciplines, I was rather and am still intrigued by subjects that are related to time, relativity and indefiniteness – like quantum physics in science, silence in music or deconstruction in philosophy. These consequently affect my art creation,” she said.
‘The Space between Us’
Her work “The Space between Us” is a work from 2010. “I used Gustav Holst’s ‘Planets’ album on a turntable, placed a marble globe in the center, and also replaced the needle with a small marble,” said Sayın.
Sayın created an orbital system in which the satellite approaches the center by the time the record rotates. And right under the satellite marble the record is distorted – “just as the planets distort space,” she said.
The work is not kinetic, but refers to the idea of rotating. It can rather be seen as a frozen moment of the process. This work, so to speak, is a poetic way of linking astral space with a love story on a musical platform.
“If the destiny is to reach the center for the satellite, this frozen moment allows us to imagine what else could happen and lets the mind and action be free: In these terms, I would agree it has an existentialist character,” she said.
