10: Abstractions, Intimations, Ruminations

Curated by Duygu Demir, the group exhibition “10: Abstractions, Intimations, Ruminations” takes place at IMALAT-HANE between September 2 and December 2, 2023. Ahmet Doğu İpek, Biriken, Burak Kabadayı, Cevdet Erek, Deniz Aktaş, Hakan Topal, Hale Tenger, Hasan Özgür Top, Huo Rf, İnci Furni and Özlem Günyol – Mustafa Kunt duo take part in the exhibition, which will present a selection of works produced in the last ten years.

The defining filter of the exhibition is the decade between 2013 and 2023; on the one hand, this figure coincides with a period in which decisive social, political and intellectual seismic movements are experienced both within Turkey and around the world, as well as a conventional but completely unconscious range of artistic investigations. The exhibition's claim is neither a holistic comprehensiveness nor a complete historical determination. The humble envision of this unity proposal is to be able to look at what is going on, slips and deviations, small or big but violent changes that cannot be imagined but occur from the arm's distance of the aesthetic act with critical thinking.

Abstraction, intimation and rumination in the title, on the other hand, imply the methods or strategies that the artists in the exhibition use while doing this, sometimes singularly and sometimes in an intertwined manner. These methods also refer to art's own vocabulary, which has transformed over the past decade, and to new and other ways of speaking. Here abstraction is 20th century. While it turns into a survival tactic, not as a reduction or neutralization of the mundane, as we know from art history, while the implication turns into the invisibility of the cunning visible, the opinion serves as a subtle but imprinted notch for both the artists and the curator, as it often does.