ÇINAR ESLEK
“Koyaanisqatsi”
October 10 – November 20 2015
Çınar Eslek is meeting the audience with her newest solo exhibition titled ‘Koyaanisqatsi’ between 10 October and 20 November. In this show, the artist is building the discourse of body through spatial information. The artist approaches the space as an abstract area with glimpsing boundaries and she puts the person to the focus of her studies who is able to reach the abstraction of this space.
The title of the exhibition refers to the movie Koyaanisqatsi directed by Godfrey Reggio in 1982 and the soundtrack of it was composed by Philip Glass. Her reference emphasizes the cinematographic view of an individual who is contemplating on the things that are gone. For the individual who is encountering the state of loss, the big words such as historicity or space are turning into images following one another. This fluidity on the other hand, shows signs on how pure image of life is constituted and vanishes with the same speed. Likewise, Koyaanisqatsi which is an Indian-American word means ‘life out of control’ or ‘unbalanced life.’
Emre Zeytinoğlu’s comments on Eslek’s new series: “In her works at this exhibition, Çınar Eslek presents already known images to the audience; the ones related to the nature gains more importance among them for instance. When we look at them, we say ‘This is part of the nature’ or we do not hesitate to call them ‘those parts of nature’ when we talk about them to each other. Moreover, we have the same confidence when we call those images ‘the nature.’ We do not think that those images are very far away from being ‘parts of the nature,’ furthermore, they do not have anything to do with ‘nature.’ Although they resemble ‘the nature,’ the images in the exhibition are broken off from the nature, reorganized, covered with chemical substances and produced as synthetical objects. And they are presented as ‘nature.’ It is as if the human beings in the 19th century who left themselves to the production system’s world of machines and dependent on not the nature they are belonging to but a ‘nature’ they created. And this is something they complain about, it is something like what Friedrich Hegel calls ‘the second nature’…”
Oil canvas, resin works and videos in the exhibition are asking questions about the images we encounter and the forms we perceive.
ÇINAR ESLEK
Çınar Eslek (1976, Tunceli) has graduated from Mimar Sinan University’s Painting department in 2006. She completed her master thesis on the transformation of the bodily pain into artwork as an experience at Marmara University’s Painting Department in 2010. Her solo shows include “Away from Certainty” (2013), “Also” (2011), “Parallel Land” (2009), “I’m not Aware” (2008). Some of the group exhibitions she joined are “Sexpression”, Macedonian Artists Association and N.U. Contemporary Artists Museum, 2012; “Uncanny Encounters”, İstanbul Modern, 2010; Mardın Bıennıal, 2010; “Chaotic Metamorphises”, Proje4l Elgiz Contemporary Art Museum, 2009; “Small Defects in the Order”, (in the framework of 28th International İstanbul Film Festival) Akbank Sanat, 2009; “Borders Orbits”, Siemens Sanat, 2008; “Don’t Ask Why”, Hafriyat Karaköy, İstanbul, 2007; “Sobe”, Galerist, 2006; Contemporary Artists Exhibition, Akbank Sanat, 2006. Eslek receieved 26th Akbank Contemporary Artists Prize and Borders Orbits – Young Talents Competition Award in 2008.
