BANU ANKA, OFF: PILEVNELI | DOLAPDERE

PİLEVNELİ hosts Banu Anka’s solo show, OFF between December 22, 2023 and January 27, 2024. In her new series, the young Iranian-born artist works with two different techniques, oil on canvas and charcoal on paper, sharing with the audience the state of ‘shutting oneself off’ that she observes sometimes in her inner world and sometimes around her.

Oscar Wilde, in his book The Picture of Dorian Gray states; “Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the colored canvas, reveals himself." For artists primarily engaged in portrait painting, this analysis holds significant importance. Especially for hyper realistic portrait painters, the face, as David Le Breton puts it, is the “hidden center of existence, the ‘head’ of human identity feelings.” The face, apart from reflecting the relationship between body and soul in its purest form, defines an individual and sets them apart from others. Faces, which have been at the center of portrait art for centuries, not only reflect the connection between ‘self’ and ‘other’, but sometimes mirror each other and at other times hold the potential to evoke entirely different emotions in their potential viewers. The relationships that can be established through expressions and gazes in different times, places or contexts are limitless.

Banu Anka is a hyper realistic painter who has been focusing on human faces and portrait painting since the beginning of her artistic career. She is an artist who reflects her personal stories and forms of expression at different periods of her life, who seeks an innovation in terms of both technique and visual language in each of her series, and who constantly improves her art by questioning herself. The reason why she has always focused on faces and especially on the eyes, which are the determinant of expression, lies in her personal history, that perhaps parallels Oscar Wilde's deduction. The fact that she remembers her eyes being filled with dust and dirt during the war in Iran and that she had a serious eye operation are some of the details behind this sensitivity. In both her solo exhibitions in 2019 and 2022, the artist, who combined her portraits and eye paintings with more abstract, colorful, complex patterns or motifs, has simplified this time, using a plainer color palette on her canvases and completely monochrome compositions in her sketches.

Away from all stimuli of the outside world: OFF mode

Especially reminiscent of the “on-off” (open-closed) modes of technological devices, the word “off” in English also carries connotations such as “exit”, “outside”, “away” or “invalid”, signifying a kind of personal distancing, closure for the artist. Living intertwined with oral and written literature due to the influence of the culture she lives in, she was inspired by a saying that she also jotted down on her easel: “The imagination (power of imagination) cannot bring to memory what the senses do not perceive.” Drawing from this sentence uttered by a thinker, the artist, in her new series, particularly focuses on the five sensory organs, questioning the interaction between the external world, selectively in perception and limitations. In this context, she questions the possibility of preserving oneself by limiting communication with any visual, auditory, verbal, or textual data due to the encirclement of our environment by strategies built on lies within the “reality perception” created by the media, centers of power and authority, consumerist society, popular culture, technology, progress, institutions or masses. She queries the potential of human self-preservation amidst the boundaries set by the constructed reality perception’s deceptive strategies. If our senses continue solely receiving what is presented to us and keep transferring it to memory, will the resulting imagination belong to us? Or is revealing the potential of our own minds only achievable by turning inward?

From Bandage Cloth to Mask: Does Metal Conceal or Heal?

As first glance, Anka’s canvases are striking with figures painted against backgrounds as shiny as glass and shades of a gray-blue sky, and metal-colored forms covering the sensory organs of each of them. These abstract glossy forms, which draw the eye away from the general outlines of the portraits, are obviously covering someone’s eyes, someone’s mouth, nose or ears. This mask-like form, which shows people in “Off” mode, seems to transform itself according to the shape of each face, almost merging with the limbs. What is surprising is that this cold metallic piece is actually based on a bandage. While interpreting the photographs of her live models in various scenes on canvas, the artist searched for a form that could reflect the industrial materials of our age, and by thickening the gauze with layers of silver paint, she reached a form that could bend and twist and fit on the face of her models. This slightly torn, patchy appearance both organically merges with the skin of the figures in the portraits and combines the healing properties of the gauze with the concealing and covering nature of the mask. The mask, originally designed to prevent permeability, to cut off the connection with the truth, and even as a metaphor, to conceal the personality, to hide our own being from the world, it takes on a different meaning with the flexible and breathable structure of the bandage.

The English word, ‘person’, on the other hand, comes from the Latin word persona, meaning mask. The root of this wod is per sonar, which signifies ‘to sound through’. In Old English, “masc”, denoting a net or mesh, emphasizes filtration, refinement, flow, and connection. In this context, a mask becomes an expression not so much of deception but a place where the self, resides, enveloped and embraced. Perhaps the mask is also a symbol for the other envelopments- the body, clothing, houses and cities- that provide the relationship between the self and the world.3 In the vivid faces painted by Anka, the form, which seems to have passed from liquid to solid, integrates with the limbs and begins to familiarize itself to our eyes despite its icy coldness, and even referring to the fetish spirit of the age. Perhaps reflecting the artist’s own “off” mode, this object turns into an intriguing abstract accessory as well as a protector by circulating in different shapes and faces.

Banu Anka, instead of focusing on faces, now portrays hands, the most sensitive organ of human skin, especially for the sense of touch. The surprise here lies in the composition, where two hands attempting to unite are hindered from feeling each other due to the presence of metal forms, inadvertently reminiscent of Michelangelo’s famous “Creation of Adam”. In that painting, the similarity in the reaching of God’s right arm to Adam’s left arm indicates God reflecting himself in human form; the fact that their fingers don’t touch signifies God imparting life to Adam with all his power and energy. This work, which has become a symbol of creation in Western art, draws attention to the gestures of the two characters. Undoubtedly, this painting has been subject to various interpretations throughout history, but what we can highlight here is merely the similarity in hand gestures within a composition that revolves around ‘touch’ or ‘inability of touch’.

The symbol of the hand, which embodies non-verbal means of communication, gestures, social or class codes, labor, authority and many other ideas and concepts, stands at an important point both physically and spiritually for Anka, just like faces. While explaining the “Off” series, the artist reminds us of another source of inspiration, Nâzım Hikmet’s poem “On Your Hands and Lying”:
“...

my people, oh, my people if broadcasts lie,
and presses lie,
and books,

and the naked haunches on the screen
and every prayer
and cradle song
and every dream, the fiddler in the inn
and the moonlight at the end of viewless days, and nothing is not false except your hands,

....
so that your hands don’t rebel ...”

Mirrors and Black and White Accompanists

Banu Anka’s artworks being displayed on mirrors in the exhibition space, transforming into infinite reflections, create a platform for a sort of confrontation. Here, layers such as the artist’s engagement with portraits, and the portrayed figures’ confrontation with themselves through the portraits, and the viewers’ confrontation with themselves through the portraits and mirrors, encompass dichotomies like reality-fiction, transparency-opacity, intimacy-alienation that the exhibition aims to emphasize. Accompanying Anka’s canvases that resemble glass are drawings produced on small-sized paper using charcoal. In these monochromatic portraits, the metallic and cold mask seems to yield its place to a more flexible, fluid, soft fabric or a plaster-like material that wraps and stretches. The figures, alongside their masks, seem to lose their clarity and sharpness, drifting towards the boundaries of the painting, merging into imagination. The convergence of the sharpness and clarity on canvases with this fluidity, flexibility, and dispersed compositions brings together contradictions, creating a cohesive, perfect narrative throughout the series through a single form circulating on the surfaces.