Turkey in the Spotlight at the Positions Berlin Art Fair

Ambidexter, Istanbul—Simla İçeli
The soft-coloured world of Simla İçeli’s paintings first lulls the viewer into a sense of security. Figures, numbers, and objects playfully dance around one another, glazed in pastel tones, floating, emerging, and disappearing again. Yet the childhood memories and pop-cultural references in İçeli’s work—such as the baby on the Cicibebe biscuits, which recurs repeatedly—serve the artist merely as vehicles of meaning for themes like discipline, punishment, and play. Layer by layer, Simla İçeli peels back culturally learned ways of thinking to reveal the underlying flaws in the patriarchal social system. The dreamlike, consoling dimension of her works goes hand in hand with the depictions of keepsakes from her family archive, through which she explores and continually questions her own cultural identity.

Ambidexter, Istanbul—Ece Özel
For Ece Özel, painting is an extension of her sonic practice as a DJ and sound artist, even though she originally studied Fine Arts in Istanbul. Yet, as many before her, she realised that the academy did not necessarily strengthen her love of art; at the time, the Turkish art scene was marked by a conservative climate. She set the paint brush aside for almost a decade, keeping her artistic and musical identities carefully compartmentalized until that separation no longer served her and she merged art and music into a single, continuous mode of expression. The musical influences are clearly evident in her paintings: Her canvases are often bathed in the same luminous nightclub reds as her DJ sets, while her layering, her orchestration of mood, and her sense of timing all resonate with the dynamics of electronic music. Much like the nocturnal world itself, Özel’s works are populated by faceless figures, fleeting silhouettes, and bodies in fluid motion.

Anna Laudel, Istanbul—Ardan Özmenoğlu
For most people, the Post-it note is little more than a means to an end: a place to jot reminders or the medium of the dreaded to-do list. Ardan Özmenoğlu screen-prints and paints these small square pieces of paper, which as a result curl up easily and create three-dimensional, almost architectural structures. In her more recent works too, the artist searches for volume, painting glass plates with nail polish, one positioned behind the other, playing with transparency and opacity to create colored layerings. Or in her neon-text sculptures, in which she draws on vernacular Turkish expressions. In some of these works she critiques patriarchal macho culture in Turkey, in others she comments on global pop-cultural phenomena—always with a touch of irony.

Anna Laudel—Oğulcan Kuş
The white glove is a recurring motif in the work of Oğulcan Kuş, a Turkish artist who spent many years living in the United States and draws heavily on American popular culture. Yet his Turkish roots are equally present. »For a really long time, I did mostly minimal and geometric works. I think that comes intuitively from being born and raised here. Turkey is a modern country with Islamic roots from the Ottoman Empire, where figural representation was forbidden for a long time. So the majority of the visual heritage consists of geometric patterns and ornaments rather than figures or representations«, the artist explains. This dual awareness runs throughout Kuş’s practice. The white gloves that appear in his paintings are inspired both by American cartoon characters such as Mickey Mouse and by his own experience working as an art handler, where wearing gloves is indispensable. There is yet another layer to the motif: »There’s a Turkish idea—the invisible hand. Something that lets destiny unfold, that makes things happen behind the scenes.«

Sanatorium, Istanbul—Erol Eskici
Erol Eskici’s fan-shaped ink structures at first bring to mind butterfly wings or the ridged texture of a seashell, but a straightforward association with nature or biology would fall short. What actually interests the artist are the analogies and processes of these morphological units: the folding, bending, unfolding, and re-closing. Whether rust, rain, or bacteria, what we see in Eskici’s work are often structures that have been pressed, bent, or laid down over time. The artist opens up a space in which forms roam about, transform, multiply, and continually give rise to new possibilities. Erol Eskici does not depict an already discovered world; rather, he creates his own visual universe.