bitmemis-unfinished

The Opening exhibition of BM-Suma will not present finished art works but the idea, research, experiments, plans, texts and other material or documentation before an art work is accomplished. The goal of this endeavor is to give the viewer an opportunity to pass through the procedures and processes of art making together with the artist and to try to imagine the outcome of this mental and physical and work. This in progress route may restore the damaged gaze of the viewer as an anonymous consumer and revamp the relationship between the artist and the viewer. The gaze is damaged in the sense that the viewer is excessively accustomed to be the submissive recipient and consume the art works which have direct visual or verbal statements. On the other side, considering the inadequate conditions of culture industry in Turkey and the artist’s delicate position in it we still need to verify and put the accent on his position as theorist, researcher, investigator and provocateur. Within the unfinished modernism and its weight on post-modernism and globalization the artist operates and produces with a certain legacy of avant-gardism, journeying into the micro and macro political, social and cultural topographies, finding connections between distanced incidents and affairs, combining proto-types with the extraordinary, planning ways out of the daily issues and triviality with unpredicted mental jumps. The artist’s operational field is a field of resistance in opposition to the commonality of consumption and media culture, to the mental lethargy and indifference and in this respect a silent and invisible antagonism prevails between the apparatus of the culture industry and art making. The yet un-produced but ready to be produced with all its mental processes, research and documentation, the art work is quite distanced to the apparatus of the culture industry. The exhibition intends to present this rare moment of virtuousness of the artwork. People need to learn more than ever to dream and share the world when nightmares generated by the ambiguous politics of globalism and the climate change constantly threaten their existence. Beatle’s song inviting people to re-think about their common existence is still convincing. And, today’s art with its multi-cultural content, with its curiosity, with its quest for alternatives is one of the most effective means to share the world. Is there not a fundamental common conviction in art making? We always affirm that an art work can survive without a gallery, a collector or a biennale but art must reach its audience in order to exist at all. However, this process is delayed, spoiled and falls through as long as the art works compete with the objects of consumption and became conceptually and technologically complex and the art market mechanisms exploits the production rationale and process in favor of its own interests. As long as we, the actors of culture industry discuss the evaluation of the art work in the media and art market and argue about the profit of art and culture institutions, we tend to abandon the social and mental benefit of art and that consequently follows by a rupture of communication between the artists and the viewer.

Beral Madra

bitmemis-unfinished
Volkan Arslan, Ergin Cavusoglu, Parastou Forouhar, Nilbar Güres, Melih Görgün, Serhat Kiraz, Ulrike Mohr, Ahmet Öktem, Sermin Sherif, Dilek Winchester