ALİ EMİR TAPAN, THE GARDEN: PİLEVNELİ | DOLAPDERE

ALİ EMİR TAPAN

THE GARDEN

1.02 - 2.03 

PILEVNELI  |  DOLAPDERE 

PİLEVNELİ is hosting Ali Emir Tapan’s solo show The Garden between February 1 and March 2, 2024. Taking its name from a work by the artist Haluk Akakçe, whom we lost in October 2023, the exhibition breaks away from the image of a “sculpture garden” reflecting power and hierarchy throughout history and transforms into an experiment with an organic atmosphere created through video, sound, light, and sculptures. In this cold space dominated by neutral tones, the artist, as always, continues to sensitively bring back to life a process that is inherently violent, in a new fiction, with new characters.

Creating a holistic experiential space, Tapan embraces the concept that themes like violence, destruction, damage, and accidents are intrinsic to the core of rebirth, healing, change, and progress. He crafts unique, fictional worlds by drawing from what he refers to as the "raw material of reality." In his recent works, the artist explores alchemical processes depicting the cyclical nature of moments disappearing and reappearing. Tapan often enriches his pieces with elements such as sound and light, engaging the senses collectively and incorporating performative elements. Rather than delving into the reasons and methods behind his creations, Tapan's focus lies in his approach to materials, knowledge, references, everyday life, and objects. The essence of his bodily and mental interaction during the transformation process or the emphasis on a detail consistently manages to resonate with the viewer.

Seeker of Self - Light/Form/Body

Everything starts with a video that blends into the white of the gallery space. A white form or a beam of light that emerges with a breath from an infinite void. It is as if we are watching the mist of the breath, as if the breath is trying to find its own body. While contemplating how the mind can establish a connection with this space and form, it concurrently attempts to assimilate various associations with the background noise, a high-pitched resonance, and the effect of breathing. As the spectator becomes immersed, the image beckons them into its unique reality, fostering a sense of intimacy with an ethereal space. Subsequently, the heartbeat emerges, allowing us to sense the vitality of the entity, evolving like a moon, transforming its shape, oscillating between fading and crystallizing, with boundaries that materialize and dissolve. The continuous background noise at the video's onset evokes the white noise conducive to lulling new-borns to sleep, reminiscent of the sounds heard in the womb. Much like white light encapsulates all colours, white noise constitutes a perpetual auditory blend resulting from the amalgamation of multiple frequencies. The heartbeat, accompanying a distinct white noise crafted by the artist around his own body, aligns with the concept of a moment of birth, a commencement. However, these lights could equally be associated with the awakening of an intensive care patient rousing from a prolonged deep slumber or, in a futuristic scenario, the revival of a body subjected to an experiment. It is a feeble body struggling to perceive the overhead beam of light, its eyes attempting to adjust to the brightness, capturing its breath and pulse as it endeavours to find itself. At times, this beam of light becomes lucid like a tunnel, instilling hope that we will emerge from darkness into light, while at other times, it loses its clarity entirely. What captivates us is the notion of an exoplanet approaching Earth or a magnificent aperture, a pathway to radiant lights. As we seek to comprehend the white entity in the quest for its form, we are prompted to contemplate the relationship between the body, the "other," and their coexistence.

Is it closer to birth or death? Or is it just a slice of life? Searching for answers is futile. These are mere moments of meditation that we can connect with the boundless imagery of birth and death, of confinement and liberation, of seeing and not seeing, of waking and sleeping all at once. A presence that arrives and departs with the persistent high-pitched ringing lingering after exposure to a loud noise. Perhaps it's an exploration of becoming, growing, healing, and searching. Alternatively, it could be a dynamic, abstract self-portrait depicting the artist's current situations and emotions. Whatever it may be, the brief encounter of a being in limbo, from a world and time beyond – or from within a body equally alien to us – and its ephemeral visit is remarkably captivating. This white-on-white video, a significant component of Tapan's atmosphere, which seamlessly moves between the familiar and the unfamiliar, serves as a crucial precursor to the pieces continuing downstairs in pursuit of their own form.

Born from Wounded - Shell/Family/Garden

On the -1st floor of the gallery space, an atmosphere predominated by a white form unfolds. This sculptural entity, resembling the frozen state of movement within the artist's fictional 'garden,' is, in fact, crafted by segmenting the impacted parts of crashed cars, anthropomorphizing them through digital manipulation, and translating them into three dimensions. This form appears to execute a distinct movement within its indistinct body, evoking the artist's work titled We Sleep Together through their coexistence and unique habitat. In the 2019-2020 installation, Tapan once again delved into the transformative potential carried by violence, casting brass in moulds made out of the tree branches pruned off by the municipality. He then assembled these branches to immortalise them as trees without roots. The branches that were split from their trunks came together to compose a new body. He dedicated these rough but fragile sculptures to his chosen family of those who refuse to conform to societal norms and expectations.[1] A similar effect is discernible in both the entirety and components of this installation. However, although the two works share a commonality in terms of the relationship between the parts and the theme of accident-violence, this time, a brighter, futuristic, and cold ambiance is established, contrasting with the previous dramatic and dim environment.

The metaphor of a car accident emerges as a recurrent theme in Tapan's body of work, mirroring the concept of organizing parts among themselves and their rebirth from points of damage, as previously explored. Numerous factors can be linked to this idea, encompassing the socio-political climate of the past decade, the nuanced relationship between the soul and the body, and the paradoxical nature of cars—significant in conformism yet capable of transforming into lethal machines based on their usage. Beyond serving as a physical intermediary between the body and asphalt, a car can be envisioned as an external self, a shell for the driver, even evolving into an extension of the body in its use. In his 2013 solo exhibition Perfect Day, Tapan showcased a series of photographs depicting vandalized cars. The segments impacted by the collisions were presented against a black background, accentuating the inherent violence and the disquieting aesthetics born from it. As articulated by Haluk Akakçe, the exhibition's curator, "these vehicles have been battered and slammed into submission." While, at that time, the artist grappled with the idea of the accident almost in its entirety without resorting to metaphor, in this instance, he abstracts the physical reality of the impact, crafting figures that encapsulate the moment of the accident—figures striving to rise, to persist in their lives, and to forge ahead. Emphasizing the gracefulness of transformation, the artist tactfully integrates the atmospheric ambiance through light and sound; a sun unable to fully rise or set appears to accompany the transitional phase of this survivor family, engrossed in the quest for life.

The space also features prints creating a vertical background for the sculptures. It's as if the shattered glass fragments of a car have transformed into a cascading waterfall within the nature of these forms. The transparency of the glass evolves into water, and dull images shift into fluid forms, prompting our bodies to establish a physical and mental connection with this 'garden.' By evoking our helpless yet graceful souls, which bear the same fragility shared by all the objects, sounds, and images we either alienate or draw close, enduring the same impacts and perpetually on guard against sudden new damage while in the process of healing.

Text: Gizem Gedik