ART350 Gallery is pleased to announce its housewarming mixed exhibition in their new location on Bankalar Street as of November 15, 2016.

The exhibition will act as a sneak peek of the gallery’s program for the upcoming year and features works by both established and emerging Turkish and international artists.

After serving for 4 years in Erenköy on the Anatolian side of Istanbul, ART350 will now be moving to the heart of Galata, a location on Bankalar Street next to the famous Kamando Stairs. One entrance faces Bankalar Street, which has been the center of finance in the last period of the Ottoman Empire, that connects Galata to Karaköy and the other is facing Banker Road.

The historical building is comprised of 5 floors and the entrance for the main exhibition area is 135 m2 with 5 m of ceiling height which will enable the Gallery to present regular exhibitions in addition to its main collections, installations, video’s as well as art shop & art books. In recent years the whole Galata area, with its newly opened art galleries, boutiques, restaurants, cafes and bars has become the artistic and bohemian center of Istanbul.

Artists: Alfredo García Revuelta / Bilal Hakan Karakaya / Fatma Sağ Tunçalp /  Hanefi Yeter / Serpil Yeter

HANEFİ YETER
“Fruits and Vegetable and…”, 1991
Installation/Oil painting on fruit boxes

Aligned are the boxes with different colours and shapes one by one… Being as fresh as a colourful daisy, there are different fruits, vegetables and other figures, intriguing people to have a closer look. Furthermore, it has a story; a story of knowing Germany, being lived and being wondered in the streets of Germany. Living in Berlin for quite some time, Hanefi Yeter shows us the dispersing fruit boxes from the increasing numbers of Turkish groceries to the pavement.

Usually opening on the ground floor of buildings with low income rental, these groceries bring colourfulness, aliveness to the melancholic spirits of people and to the streets that they are located in. These works cannot be considered as the iconography of the art of painting, but it touches on a new, contemporary area. Pictures of fruits and vegetables do not exist as their sole beings as they do in nature morte and nature paintings, but presented here by Yeter as the functionalised nature, serving the demands of the consumer society.

The fruits and vegetables, painted in real fruit boxes with oil painting technique, externalise the schizophrenic state of city folks of the West, who are estranged to the nature and used to buy these products from the supermarket.

The faces that we see among the fruits in the installation, remind us the human factor that modern times have forgot; the audience faces the respect and shyness towards others and the nature. Fruits, vegetables and faces, ply between the gallery space and the streets…

SERPİL YETER
“Bağla”, 2016
Acrylic on the backside of a carpet
260 x 145 cm

Bodrum. Serpil Yeter, a spacious garden, the sea, the sky… Calmness, serenity, a story seems to be covering the carpet.

As our pair of eyes meet another, we look at a secret garden behind its back, towards its space. It seems as if these eyes are inviting us, yet they also want us to stay at a certain distance; and so we are drawn to it, wanting to wander around in that magical world.

This is a living space; a space, which grows blossoms and changes with memories, sharing, producing… As Serpil Yeter herself “grows” and continues to change, she puts a fountain in the middle of her garden as a birthday present to herself; where she will create something unique and special.

At the centre of her own world, she salutes her new age with her birthday present, her calmness and serenity; she opens the doors of her “Bağla” to us.

SERPİL YETER
“A journey to Tomorrow?”, 2013-2015
Acrylic on Canvas
153 x 240 cm

Bodrum. This is a journey towards the unknown and the darkness. Families with unknown fates who do not know whether they will reach the coast or not, the constantly displacing households… A search for escape and exit, which looks like an invasion to the Eagean coast from the outside. Even the castle, the symbol of power, does not guard them under its wings; instead it hurls them to the sea and leaves.

One of the most bitter realities… Hundreds of lifeboats, where only very few might make it to the shore on the other side; is this a journey to tomorrow?

BİLAL HAKAN KARAKAYA
“Disengagement”, 2016
Aluminium, polyester, resin, pigment

People are in search of a meaning in everything and everyone. This is the disease of our time. A time that, without being practical at all, believes it is the most practical of all times…
-Pablo Picasso

Disengagement, TDK (Definition in Turkish Language Institution): 1. The process of disengagement 2. The state that the organs start functioning normally after the constriction of the voice. 3- (spiritual definition) The degeneration of the entire entity, character or such. 

Disengagement, Aluminium: Aluminium is a silvery-white metal which is found as “bauxite” in nature. It is well known with its high resistance to oxidation. This resistance is based on its passivating speciality. There is almost no where aluminium is not used in. Its disengagement in the nature is up to 100- 300 years. Whilst the material’s damages to human health is not known clearly, it is thought that it is in association with modern illnesses such as breast cancer, Alzheimer, allergy and autism.

Disengagement, Polyester:  Polyester, whose raw material consist of oil products and anthracite tar (the black liquid of the earth), is a carcinogenic material that disengages in nature in 1000 years.

Modern technology is needed in order to obtain these two materials. Both of them which exist in their pure substance, are being gathered and reformed. Their disengagement is achievable only by oxidation and with the division of their polymers. They have a glittering, shining, synthetic attractiveness.

Disengagement, Hakan: “I occasionally come across the de-formed, indescribable living organisms on the street; they are empty, transparent, emotionless, illogical entities with corrupted bodies, who walk around with dark liquids circulating inside… What I see in them, started by feeling the dirtiness of what I had inside. There was a need of a catharsis that I could not explain (Imagine a mere, pure life that starts in water. And how it gets dirty when the life starts.) It was an attempt to get rid of the gall inside myself; it was an effort to impure the clean surface; I threw it out of me.”

Our day, is the actual dirt that lies beneath the shiny, glossy surface. It is humanly transformed and lost its purity… The black gall integrates with the material; they disengage by finding their own textual resolution.

ALFREDO GARCÍA REVUELTA
“The Family”
Epoxy-putty Sculpture

“Balance”, they all say… Balance is the first and foremost. The foremost requirement for living, working, eating, drinking, friendships, starting a family: “Balance”.

As Alfredo Garcia Revuelta displays the smaller institution of the society being tested against balance and its hierarchical structure; he separates the glassy glanced characters from emotions and solidifies them.

Should the families be fine in the big palms of men? Should the balances be determined by responsibilities? Do genders determine the positions, the duties, the institutions?

With the small details, his irony and his fiction, the artist brings us together with a familiar family and our own balances, yet again.

FATMA SAĞ TUNCALP
“Looking for Dilmun”, 2015
Installation with fabric and cement

Dilmun, as written in Sumerian Paradise Myth Tablets, is described as a beautiful, pure and brilliant country with wide green fields and fruit gardens where there is no illness, senility or death. Also wildness does not exist; animals do not hunt and eat each other. Dilmun is an excellent place where there is pure happiness and peace.

The image of a paradise carries concepts such as eternity, rebellion, refusion, struggle, renovation, sense of belonging, immigration, new lands, hope, desperation, degeneracy, estrangement, corruption and regeneration. Therefore, “Looking for Dilmun” is an exhibition of a journey. This wide theme includes the main problems regarding human beings, the spiritual stages that make us “human” and therefore, it is an infinite source that is still being worked on.

The animals with re-placed, sewed, chopped bodies are put together and united again; this is a rebellion against being destroyed… Searching for the paradise, is a struggle and resistance against the routine flow of life, the rules of nature and the reality of death. This is also an internal journey, springing back to life, a person’s individual reinvention and resurrection back to life.

The material used here, cement, is a reproach against the hands of human, demolishing, corrupting the nature and the world; a reproach against us…

Text: Gizem Gedik
Resources: Çetin Güzelhan, Hanefi Yeter (1967-2001), İstanbul: Bilim Sanat Galerisi, 2002
Fatma Sağ Tuncalp, “Looking for Dilmun”, Halki Theological School Exhibition Text