Lacunae
Josilda da Conceição Gallery, Amsterdam
2024
Synecdoche, Synecdoche, Synecdoche,
Studio Current, Amsterdam
2024
It was after a soft-core hookup ( no penetration, only hands and mouth as God intended) that we found ourselves lying in bed getting lost in the required post-coital conversation to show respect to each other. And the formula of questions that are already designed for us to speak, arrived.
Where from?
How long have you been in Amsterdam?
What do you do?
I told him that I am an artist and a writer. Finding myself in a moment which I am able to display my narcissism to an audience. I started talking about my current project on Medea which I was working on. He said he loved Medea. The conversation went on for another 15 minutes while we exchanged our ideas, until I realized that he was talking about the Tyler Perry movie franchise.
“You artists,” he told me before leaving my room. “Into funny stuff. aren’t you?”
The categorization of ‘you artists’ manifests itself as you navigate through the two rooms and observe the works of Tom, Emre, Killian, Nanna, and Hippolyte. The artists here show their work in relation to their friendship and what that network of acknowledgment feels like when one finds oneself in the cogwheels of institutional mannerism of putting on a show together. Ghostly images take you to desire to form a relation with the artists. You are in a very romantic setting (I made a joke here), and romance is best not explained, but experienced. Re narrativizing is a power we all behold, but the artists desire to take that feeling in a space in the shape of… (well, fill in the dots with whichever work you are seeing right now).
Some questions for the artists for the exhibition text:
Any strong references you feel need to be mentioned?
Where is the title coming from?
What was your process (change “process” to something that sounds way cooler)?
What are you going to wear to the opening?
I once told a friend that when I see a work, the first question that comes to my mind is; how does the artist look? I love hot artists. A little fling with an artist in their studios with messy floors always gives me a new perspective on their work. De-intellectualization is fashionable here! (Maybe take this part out, sounds a little cringe :(). We are mapped through a fictional network of gossip as we try to create safety nets for each other. Feeling left alone with what has been given to us, trying not to get manipulated, while at the same time the trickery of it sounds and looks rather sexy. (birds sounds are annoying me, maybe try to write something about that). In the inconsequential (learn low to pronounce inconsequential) relationality that brought us together (art school), we tried to make sense of these white walls (how original) to their practices and what my exhibition text looks like.
Many drinks, different landscapes, falling in and out of love and fucking somehow created this group of works that you seem to experience over a drink (will there be drinks, heard there is no budget). The act of telling can take many forms in the same landscape. Like Scheherazade, they keep retelling the stories of a fictional collectivity in haunted gestures. Eroticism is rather a sculptural tonality in the space. From painting, to images, to installation, every work takes on a very eerie mannerism in the space which has been given to them to work with, and given to us to see. This (so-called) romantic relation is the core of this exhibition.
“I believe this to be an authentically senseless chain of correspondences, but in the jingle-jangle morning of that summer it made as much sense as anything else did,” writes Joan Didion in “The White Album”, making us ask the same question again and again of the intentions of our desires and how to make sense of them. This act of questioning is rather simple but with good intentions. It is the jingle jangle of our friendship and the act of self-exhibiting (no curators, no institutions, just friends in and outside of these walls).
“Having a Coke with You is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona, partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better. happier St. Sebastian, partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yogurt…” Reads Frank O’Hara with a very strong gesturality of a poet. Cigarette in hand, his distanced “poet voice”.
It makes you wonder; who is “you”? That takes the form of many different faces, clothes, cities, lovers, families, landscapes. drinks..
And here lies the answer (partially in a very small but sensual manner) to that question.
Here is the “you” of many forms and shapes.
— Mehmet Suzgun
Where from?
How long have you been in Amsterdam?
What do you do?
I told him that I am an artist and a writer. Finding myself in a moment which I am able to display my narcissism to an audience. I started talking about my current project on Medea which I was working on. He said he loved Medea. The conversation went on for another 15 minutes while we exchanged our ideas, until I realized that he was talking about the Tyler Perry movie franchise.
“You artists,” he told me before leaving my room. “Into funny stuff. aren’t you?”
The categorization of ‘you artists’ manifests itself as you navigate through the two rooms and observe the works of Tom, Emre, Killian, Nanna, and Hippolyte. The artists here show their work in relation to their friendship and what that network of acknowledgment feels like when one finds oneself in the cogwheels of institutional mannerism of putting on a show together. Ghostly images take you to desire to form a relation with the artists. You are in a very romantic setting (I made a joke here), and romance is best not explained, but experienced. Re narrativizing is a power we all behold, but the artists desire to take that feeling in a space in the shape of… (well, fill in the dots with whichever work you are seeing right now).
Some questions for the artists for the exhibition text:
Any strong references you feel need to be mentioned?
Where is the title coming from?
What was your process (change “process” to something that sounds way cooler)?
What are you going to wear to the opening?
I once told a friend that when I see a work, the first question that comes to my mind is; how does the artist look? I love hot artists. A little fling with an artist in their studios with messy floors always gives me a new perspective on their work. De-intellectualization is fashionable here! (Maybe take this part out, sounds a little cringe :(). We are mapped through a fictional network of gossip as we try to create safety nets for each other. Feeling left alone with what has been given to us, trying not to get manipulated, while at the same time the trickery of it sounds and looks rather sexy. (birds sounds are annoying me, maybe try to write something about that). In the inconsequential (learn low to pronounce inconsequential) relationality that brought us together (art school), we tried to make sense of these white walls (how original) to their practices and what my exhibition text looks like.
Many drinks, different landscapes, falling in and out of love and fucking somehow created this group of works that you seem to experience over a drink (will there be drinks, heard there is no budget). The act of telling can take many forms in the same landscape. Like Scheherazade, they keep retelling the stories of a fictional collectivity in haunted gestures. Eroticism is rather a sculptural tonality in the space. From painting, to images, to installation, every work takes on a very eerie mannerism in the space which has been given to them to work with, and given to us to see. This (so-called) romantic relation is the core of this exhibition.
“I believe this to be an authentically senseless chain of correspondences, but in the jingle-jangle morning of that summer it made as much sense as anything else did,” writes Joan Didion in “The White Album”, making us ask the same question again and again of the intentions of our desires and how to make sense of them. This act of questioning is rather simple but with good intentions. It is the jingle jangle of our friendship and the act of self-exhibiting (no curators, no institutions, just friends in and outside of these walls).
“Having a Coke with You is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona, partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better. happier St. Sebastian, partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yogurt…” Reads Frank O’Hara with a very strong gesturality of a poet. Cigarette in hand, his distanced “poet voice”.
It makes you wonder; who is “you”? That takes the form of many different faces, clothes, cities, lovers, families, landscapes. drinks..
And here lies the answer (partially in a very small but sensual manner) to that question.
Here is the “you” of many forms and shapes.
— Mehmet Suzgun
Fabricated Love
Enari Gallery, Amsterdam
2024
Bir Tatlı Huzur / Bebek Sahil
Springboard Art Fair, Werkspoorkathedraal, Utrecht
2023
On the 30th and the 31st of May in 2022, respectively,
there was a sighting of a couple having sex, and a man
lying down nude, enjoying a cigarette in a busy public
spot in Istanbul; the shore of Bebek-a historic neighbourhood on the Bosphorus which has been associated
with being a more tranquil, affluent and scenic area of
the city. These images went viral, circulating around various Turkish media platforms, and several similar incidents were being sighted across the country around the
same timeline. These incidents-for a lot of people had a
symbolic resonance of the sociopolitical and economic
situation of the country. People were increasingly frustrated with the immense economic and administrative
mismanagement that had been increasing in the last decade and markedly of the hostility of the ruling political
party towards anyone that didn’t fit in their conservative,
political-Islamist following. These images of these incidents had been inordinately circulating across social media and had begun to carry a meme-like quality. In this
painting series, these images are monumentalised and
slightly obscured to emphasise an uncanny quality that
they already have.