HARUN ANTAKYALI, UNTİTLED, MİXED MEDİA,120X100CM,2013
Harun Antakyalı:
“I am an urban man, main themes of my works are always metropolis and streets…
I do not paint those streets, I move those streets to interiors.
I am nourished by the city and the daily endeavours of urban people,
I know the street, and its jargon well…
As an artist who took the art on the street and placed back in to halls; I want my extraordinary stance in early 90s to give clues to the future generations.
Why concrete?
Concrete is one of the materials that are comprised in the metropolitan structures.
It is the basis of many artistic performances done in the public domain; walls, avenues and streets, viaducts, bridges, dams, gateways, stadiums, sea and airports, terminal stations, columns and pylons, etc…
We born into it, we walk in/on/under it throughout the career education started in our childhood. As a necessity of our age, it is with us in death. It witnesses our whole life…
How much of an art is the nominative state of this material, that everybody tampers with.
Minimum/maximum.
Nominative state is minimal, as it is being added with experiences, it can transform into spectacles (vehicle/venue/surface/form) maximal magnitudes.
Concrete is also;
Monochrome,
Chemical,
Of physical power.
It preserves, it destroy. (it is vital)
Concrete is as frightening as it is preserving.
It is provocative when it is turned into an artistic project or used as a material for art.
Pondering on what forms it can take when it is in nominative state can carry our thoughts into a provocative dimension.
Its extraordinariness and ordinariness may give it a living space and a platform of speech.
Its discourse harbour modernity, its action harbour a historical process, and it is a material that helps men to exist where they are.
It is Postmodern.
HARUN ANTAKYALI, UNTİTLED, MİXED MEDİA,120X55CM
Concrete and I
To convey my message to the ones who give message when doing art, who try to feature visual mathematics, who paint, who chisel, who form and who present beauty in their own aesthetic understanding, using different media-courses;
to tell my findings which for years I have been pondering, first, I made concrete canvasses. This was the first step.
I tell “the states of concrete” in the second step.
I will spread into cities, settlements, premises, I will be wherever concrete is used. On the ground and on the ceiling, both in interior and exterior, now, I am the basis of everything that is done to make beautiful and to give messages.
From museums to galleries, from public and corporate buildings to streets and highroads…
I embrace the most popular material of the metropolis, a universal material.
I can be anywhere with the nominative form of this material (concrete). On streets of a city, on the bridges that you pass when you go from city to city, on viaducts, in the tunnels you enter, at the construction sites by the roads. On the retaining and garden walls, on the ways of a park, in your schools etc.
From the hospital you are born to the graves that you are put to your eternal rest, I will be there.
With concrete I will divide, and restore,
I will startle, protect, I will connect you to a new exit while quandaries appear.
I can be a labyrinth while being a flat ground. I can be stairs while I am an impassable wall. While I have the power to change your lives with my most minimal actions, I will get ugly with my maximal state… I will be beautiful.
Departing from everything that is done in the name of art and everything that tells a tale, I will present the people the story itself.
Whether be in the gallery areas, or in public domain, I will prove that what the process of a material coming from history to the contemporary modernist thought can affect from sociology to psychology.
HARUN ANTAKYALI, UNTİTLED, MİXED MEDİA,80X200CM,2014
Because; I think that the duty of the art doer should be to carry the mission of exhorting into another dimension and therefore rescuing people from the intellectual repetition and put them into another route.
Concrete is universal.
Art should change dimension, not shell. The need for formations and ideas which do not conform to the epoch, but rather to usher in a new age with what they gain from the contemporary age is becoming more and more apparent.
Extraordinary…
Irrational…
It is very important to create new formations.
I aim to substantiate the presentation of a new formation which will involve every successive formation, and which will open ways to the ones executing these, with this universal material.
My relationship with concrete proves what you ignore: the individuality of the artist and what he can embrace, with one overarching apprehensive and comprehensive language of all the branches of visual arts, and with a material that you see everyday.
I will live, do, and consume.
I know the street, I can make a living space in the streets of every metropolis in the world.
My body does not have to be everywhere I made a living space for myself.
I can be everywhere as I make you see what you ignore.
I can hide myself in the little details of the walls of big cities.
I can subsume the whole city.
Since I know that the viewers will gain perceptual selectivity after seeing my works, I know I am going to be with them all times. I am here to attribute urban imagery to people.”
Harun ANTAKYALI
İstanbul 2012
HARUN ANTAKYALI, UNTİTLED, MİXED MEDİA,120X100CM,2014