Nevin Aladağ
"JAMMING"
September 13 - October 15, 2022
PILEVNELI | Dolapdere
PILEVNELI is pleased to present “Jamming,” the first solo exhibition by Nevin Aladağ at the gallery, guest-curated by Adam Szymczyk. The exhibition will take place at the gallery's location in Dolapdere between the dates September 13 – October 15, 2022.
Permanently based in Berlin and mostly working from that city, Aladağ is not an unfamiliar figure to Turkish audiences as she previously exhibited some of her works in Turkey at Arter (2020 and 2022) and Istanbul Modern (2013), among other venues. Recently, the artist also participated in documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel and 57th Venice Biennial (both 2017), while her major solo shows were held at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2019) and Villa Stuck in Munich (2021).
The exhibition “Jamming”, conceived as a focused survey of Nevin Aladağ’s more recent works, extends across three floors of the gallery. The works in the exhibition testify to the artist’s consistent interest in sound- and pattern-making and the function of rhythm and ornament as crucial binding elements in all social relations. Nearly all of Aladağ’s works can be either performed or at least conjure a possibility of performative use.
An array of Aladağ’s recent series can be seen (and heard) at PILEVNELI, among which are unusual sounding sculptures of “Body Instruments” and “Resonating Spaces” series, abstract compositions assembling carpets of different origins and materials of “Social Fabric” series, see-through painted aluminum sculptures combining patterns borrowed from various sources (“Pattern Kinship”) and a new three-channel video installation “Jamming,” which gave the exhibition its title.
But “jamming,” which is both interference and collective improvisation, can be also seen as general operating principle of Aladağ’s entire practice. The video installation “Jamming” uses similar motives and devices as those in some of the artist’s previous video works, “Session” (2013) and “Traces” (2015), in which instruments of both popular and classical music were animated and “played” by non-human agency – for instance by sand blown by the wind, movement of tree branches, falling water drops. Were these, ultimately, natural or manmade sounds? Nevin Aladağ’s work questions the borders and inquires the connections between chance processes and intentional actions, cultural codes and patterns of natural growth, vernacular aesthetics and industrial production, traditional knowledges and new urban lifestyles. Hers is a view on the world as a wonder that is constantly changing form, shifting, both expanding and shrinking, taking space and giving way, and slowly taking possession of all of us as we try and fail to keep it in check.
“Jamming” opens with a vernissage on September 13, 2022 at 18.00. The exhibition will be on view from Tuesday to Saturday between 10.00-18.00 until October 15, 2022.
