Curated by: Melih Fereli

February 10 – 26, 2012

Other participants are Erol Akyavaş, Kutluğ Ataman, İnci Eviner, Bahk Seon Ghi, Antony Gormley, Nilbar Güreş, Kim Joon, Chris Jordan, Nur Koçak, Servet Koçyiğit, İlhan  Koman, Volker Marz, Frank Plant, Jaume Plensa, Hale Tenger, Canan Tolon, Nazif Topçuoğlu, Baltazar Torres.

February 9 – April 28, 2012

December 21, 2011 – January 28, 2012

“People don’t see the world before their eyes until it’s put in narrative mode.”
-Brian De Palma (film director)

NON is pleased to host Gökçen Cabadan’s fourth solo exhibition titled Golem Scene from December 21, 2011 to January 28, 2012. In the installation, painting and drawings featured in the exhibition Cabadan brings together images collected from magazines, brochures and the net with a collage-like logic in order to render timeless certain familiar forms of narrative. In portraits ripped apart from their context and dragged into ambiguity the emphasis is on the absence of identity, whereas in the installations we sense the emergence of the qualities of a still life.

A Golem is created from mud -a soulless, yet living creature. In the context of this exhibition, Cabadan uses the image of the Golem as a metaphor for the removal of kinship ties, disconnection, decontextualization, or a ‘Frankenstein’ metaphor; and imagines a zone once indicated by signifiers but now completely independent of them.

Since reality is formed in social memory through various narratives, it is impossible to speak of any reality beyond what has always already been thought of and narrated. In this sense, archiving, documentation and history writing are merely the craft of aligning time. Therefore history is perhaps more a form of literature rather than a science.

Rembrandt’s “Belshazzar’s Feast” is a pictorial representation of literary narrative. The moment Belshazzar sees the writing on the wall telling him he has less than 24 hours to live, from the fearful looks on the faces of the king and the maids to the wine spilling out from golden cups, everything in the painting is in action.

Thus we comprehend the entire duration of the event within a single composition. The narrative of a long story is folded into the representation of a single moment. Within this whole composed of diverse references; folds, connections and stories intervene in the painting within the intensified moment- the Golem determines the painting, and the more the painting listens to the Golem, the more it looks at it, and in fact, the more it surrenders to it, the wider access it has to myriad resources.

With Golem Scene, Cabadan invites the viewer to experience the primitive. He seeks the reason behind primitive man’s act of drawing the picture of his hunt on the walls of a cave.

(This exhibition will be at NON Tophane.)

December 9 – 28, 2011

NON is pleased to announce Berlin-based artist Johannes Vogl’s first solo show in Istanbul between December 9 – 28, 2011.

Bringing a self-consciously absurd approach to art, nature and social interactions, Vogl’s current show presents new installations the artist produced during his residency program in Istanbul.

“Column of Steam” (2011) a sculptural work drawing its inspiration from the omnipresent Turkish practice of tea drinking, casts traditional family structures in a light that is both humorous and precarious. A tower of teapots stacked one upon another up to the ceiling boils without end over a stove plugged into a gas tank on the gallery’s floor. Collected by the artist from various families, these teapots reflect the complexity of family relations in Turkish society; while each pot can draw warmth from those below it, all of them run the risk of toppling should any of the others be disturbed. And, of course, one is tempted to ask whether this is really the most reasonable way to make a large amount of tea.

The artist inherited a passion for invention from his grandfather and many of his works reflect his fascination with making machines. One such invention featured in the exhibition, titled “The Night” (2008), is a slide projector designed by Vogl to project onto the gallery wall a moving image of the moon that completes its cycle every three hours. As with some of Vogl’s previous inventions, the piece represents a curious duplication of natural reality that recalls many of the strange uses to which human creativity is put in the contemporary era. “The Swarm” (2011), a somewhat stranger mechanism that cycles dried fish around a vertical structure and casts their shadows on the wall, approaches the question of nature and technology from yet another perspective.

Another work, the installation “Sleepers” (2011) consists of several videos of dogs sleeping on the streets of Istanbul at night. Instead of duplicating natural reality, this work focuses on the urban, making viewers look more closely at a scene they might very well encounter on their way home from the gallery. Finally, a photographic piece titled “Father and Son” (2008) has damaged candleholders standing in for an actual father and son.

Johannes Vogl is a German artist born in Kaufbeuren in 1981. He has studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe, the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and the University of the Arts Berlin. His previous group exhibitions include “Under Destruction” (2011), Swiss Institute, New York City; “The Moment Pleasantly Frightful” (2011), Laura Bartlett Gallery, London; “Under Destruction” (2010) Tinguely Museum Basel; “Raw Cases” (2010), Siemens Sanat, Istanbul; “Deceitful Moon” (2009), The Hayward Gallery Project Space, London; “Everything solid… turns into thin air” (2009) MuHKA, Antwerp; “Manifesta 7” (2008), Rovereto and solo exhibitions include “Johannes Vogl” (2011), Kunstverein Hildesheim, Hildesheim; “Johannes Vogl” (2011), Galerie Matthew Bown, Berlin; “Johannes Vogl” (2009), Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna.

The exhibition is kindly supported by the Berlin Senate Cultural Affairs Department, BM Contemporary Art Center and Melih Görgün.

December 9, 2011 – February 19, 2012

www.arnolfini.org.uk

November 26, 2011 – January 15, 2012

Curated by Peio Aguirre, Kit Hammonds, Tone Hansen/Ane Hjort Guttu, Jarosław Lubiak/Joanna Sokołowska/Jarosław Suchan, Filip Luyckx, Markus Miessen/Felix Vogel, Lena Prents, Esra Sarigedik-Öktem, Miško Šuvaković, Jun Yang

www.gfzk-leipzig.de