HOMECOMING, Photography Exhibition, Toz Artist Run Space

Homecoming

Bekir Dindar, Cansu Yıldıran, M. Cevahir Akbaş

Curators: Ezgi Bakçay & Volkan Kızıltunç

July 01-23, 2017

TOZ Artist Run Space

The exhibition entitled "Homecoming" consists of photographs, videos and sound installations produced by three young artists who reinterpret ties between documentary photography and contemporary art. In the exhibition, "homecoming" is narrated as moving towards the unknown and an impossible journey to complete. Each journey is primarily visualized as a performative image production process in which the artist-subject enacts herself/himself. Shortly after, concepts such as home, history, myth, memory, nature and non-belonging are opened to debate.

"Nostos", a theme used in Greek literature, relates to the epic hero who is trying to return home. This journey usually involves many dangers that test the hero. Returning home is not just a physical act. The hero actually tries to return to himself, to make sense of himself on a cognitive map, and to establish an identity in which he will feel like at home. However, it is no longer possible to return home. The pathos of the hero is rooted in the fact that it is neither possible to return to the roots nor getting rid of them. The concern is not to go back, but to think of a historiography that recovers the past in the present.

Bekir Dindar, Cansu Yıldıran and M. Cevahir Akbaş work by throwing complex knots between myth, everyday social life, history and single personal experience. By constantly changing the scale, they are revealing a new interpretation of "nostos". It is a storytelling that is neither personal in the modernist sense nor impersonal in a postmodern sense. The subject is eagerly searching herself/himself, but still resists being single-centered. There is no safe area to hide behind the frame. It is because the story of “homecoming” never belongs to a single subject. All of this is revealed in the uncanny distance, which oscillates between the very near and far, dominating all the work on the show.

In the project entitled “Landless”, Cansu Yıldıran historicalizes childhood memories based in Kuşmer Plateau in the Black Sea Region in the context of gender. She is turning her discontinuous memory and ambiguous identity into a non-house that her mother will never have. The expected end result of the journey as being a remedy in some way ends up in the uncanny identity. M. Cevahir Akbaş pursues his father’s secret identity as a hunter and the lost time withheld by him. He transforms his personal story into a hunting story, which is as old as human history, taking place around an ancient mountain. Production of the work entitled "Hunter" is separated from classical documentary language as a performative process in which nature, history, myth and subjective experience are incorporated. Bekir Dindar takes the thermal power plant built near Karabiga village, where his family lived, and its damage to nature, social life and personal memory as his subject. The artist not only witnesses, but also participates in the ecological struggle with his photography medium. He does not hesitate to put himself into the story as a historical subject. Alongside "Karabiga", the tension between different identities is also visualized. He duplicates story narrators and collectivizes the subject with sound installations that implement his work.

The exhibition "Homecoming", which consists of photographs, video and sound installations will be open on Saturdays and Sundays during July 01-23, between 12.00 – 18.00 at TOZ Artist Run Space located in Yeldeğirmeni, Kadıköy. 

TOZ artist run space is supported by SAHA within the scope of "Support Fund for the Sustainability of Independent Art Initiatives 2016-2017"