Editions IV - Parallel Realities

15 May-21 June 2014, Elipsis Gallery, Istanbul

Artists: Tuğçe Ayerdoğan, Oğuz Karakütük, İrem Sözen

Curators: Refik Akyüz, Serdar Darendeliler

​

The fourth edition of Editions, a series initiated by Elipsis Gallery to introduce the art world, collectors, and photography enthusiasts to new photographers and photographic works, brings together the work of Tuğçe Ayerdoğan, Oğuz Karakütük, and İrem Sözen under the title 'Parallel Realities'. The exhibition is curated by Refik Akyüz and Serdar Darendeliler of Geniş Açı Project Office.

All three photographers had previously crossed paths with Geniş Açı Project Office through its workshops. What connects their practices is the creation of parallel realities around people, nature, and the past, drawing on their own experiences. What distinguishes them is the different photographic approaches and aesthetics through which they construct these realities. As the three bodies of work date from roughly the same period, they generate parallel realities not only within their individual narratives but also in relation to one another.

For Tuğçe Ayerdoğan (1980), whose fundamental motivation is to explore through photography the feeling of being alienated from oneself, 'Moonlight' turns reality into a story through journeys into the darker corners of her own life. Moving through the paths opened up by her fears and anxieties, Ayerdoğan attempts to untangle both her own knots and those of others, focusing on her life and on the lives that unfold around her. What emerges are fragments of a story that is at once familiar yet strange, deeply personal yet universal, concealed yet exposed.

Inspired by rivers that begin at a single source and flow through different branches towards seas they have never known, Oğuz Karakütük (1983) creates a new reality in his series 'Delta' from the landscapes he encounters during long journeys undertaken alone to unfamiliar places. Bringing together photographs made in geographically contrasting environments, Karakütük seeks to construct a visual delta. Like stones carried towards the sea by rivers, his photographs, when brought together, extend beyond what each image depicts on its own, generating new forms of representation and meaning through their coexistence.

In 'Recall', İrem Sözen (1984) reconstructs experiences of attachment and separation as a parallel reality, bringing together photographs from different periods and narrating experiences as they have been remembered over time. With each attempt to remember, the past is reconstructed through the things memory deliberately leaves out, adds, or distorts. Although this reconstructed past may appear to have broken away from reality, it does not lose its meaning; on the contrary, it acquires a new one. In this way, an experience that may have been painful is reworked into something restorative and ultimately healing.