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June 10 – July 15, 2011

Artists: Aslı Çavuşoğlu, Nazım Hikmet Richard Dikbaş, Jan Freuchen, Basim Magdy, Magali Reus, Ben Van den Berghe, Conrad Ventur

curated by Nazlı Gürlek

Rehearsal is a group show which brings together various representations of disappearance and absence, in order to reflect upon emotional commitment and personal desires in media-hooked-in contemporary living. At its center is an urge to relate to the subjective scenarios that are constructed in relation to faces, places, facts and histories. So, the exhibition deals with the invisible while tracing subjective hints to cultural facts mainly as a result of the mind’s ability to construct stories from what is thought to be seen and heard with the uncertainty of mediated experiences, simulated realities, imaginary selves and cultural mash-ups.

Rehearsal takes inspiration from Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966), and references some scenes and ideas explored throughout the film to construct a conceptual framing of the exhibition. The film tells of one day in David Hemmings’ life, a fashion photographer who believes to have captured on film a mysterious murder while wandering around some green fields in town. The uncertainty of the event, the photographer’s futile quests for a clue in pictures taken in the field, the illogical timeline of events and excessive aesthetic trimmings such as deceptively vibrant colors and the unconventionally slow running plot, all make up for a structure where, the perception of the passing of time becomes blurred, cause and effect relations are discarded, and sense of reality confused. Rehearsal begins at the point where David turns into himself departing from what he thought to have seen, and where a new space and time relationship is cut out.

This group show brings together aesthetics of film, documentary, sculpture, performance, cultural, post-monumental and post-industrial artifacts. The pieces share a particular way of working, one which conceals and reveals their referentiality and origins, facts and fissures of their making processes. The fragmentary, serial and incomplete manner in which stories and situations are presented, with broken references to context and ideology, calls for speculative scenarios to be rehearsed on the displayed forms, content and significance.

Rehearsal speaks to our psyche and urges to reflect on the relationship between imaginary realities and real fictions, loss and appearance, obscurity and emergence.

Magali Reus‘ installations appear like empty sets for rehearsing imaginary mise-en-scenes. The objects resemble an exercise apparatus, but they are purely dysfunctional aesthetic objects. What appears to be a free space for movement is indeed blocked. Contrasts such as familiarity/strangeness, freedom/limits of experience, obligation/arbitrariness are the ongoing concerns in Reus’ artistic practice.

After declaring war against Russia in 1914, the Ottoman government decided to demolish the Russian monument at Ayastefanos and commissioned the officer Fuat Uzkınay to film the destruction process. Though referred to as the first Turkish film ever made, the footage has never been found. It is also unclear if such a film really existed. Aslı Çavuşoğlu’s drawing/photographs create a substitution for the missing process.

In an on-going project, Conrad Ventur revisits Andy Warhol’s 60’s Screen Tests shot in The Factory films living Screen Test subjects (Billy Name, Mario Montez, Ivy Nicholson, Ultraviolet, Bibbe Hansen, Penelope Palmer ve Jonas Mekas) in the same manner as the originals created some forty years ago. This series is part of the artist’s video-installations that raise questions regarding the cinematic experience’s ability to transform our time-space perceptions; presenting us fragmentary timelines, disrupting the perception of the continuous flow of time, and creating the illusion that time is made of simultaneous multiple temporalities.

To create this new work for the show, Jan Freuchen takes as departure point the Capgras delusion, a syndrome where the person believes that a close relative has been replaced by an identical impostor, to create this new work for the show. Freuchen adapts the condition to art to investigate the autonomy and credibility of the artwork. Empathy references Andre Cadére’s Barres de bois rond (Round Wooden Bars, 1970–78) – long poles made of coloured wooden cylindrical units. In this work the wooden units are replaced by rubber wrist bands, used in live8 charity events. Palette consists of a canvas with a xerox of the classic “rock band” photo of the four self-proclaimed fathers of conceptual art: Kosuth, Weiner, Heubler and Barry. Their faces are covered by oil paint, in the manner of Baldessarri’s works – and turned into a painter’s palette. Ding is made of 100 earphones and references Eva Hesse’s rope installations. Portable Canvas consists of a pile of cotton bags; a definition of the Capgras delusion imprinted on them bringing together a Christopher Wool-style typographical work together with cotton canvas bags – one of the essential elements you need to establish a biennial or a museum shop.

Nazım Hikmet Richard Dikbaş’s drawings consist of portraits paired with short sentences in speech bubbles. Lacking of cause-effect relations, complete compositions and perspectives, these fragmentary and repetitive drawings bring together image and text, and explore the workings of human perception, transiency of emotions, and expressions of the subconcious mind.

Basim Magdy’s A Film About The Way Things Are is shot in three different locations: a miniature park in Istanbul, a masquerade parade in Basel and the island of Elba in the Mediterranean. The work evolved from his desire to make a film about masquerading yet in its final form it is open to various interpretations. Footage of odd architectural models that replicate historical monuments are interrupted by seaside recordings while performers parade in absurd costumes. The footage constitutes the backdrop for the narrator’s sincere voice that questions his existence, regrets and the flow of time as he speaks of dreams, gestures, memories and the repetition of events.

Ben Van den Berghe’s photographs show a series of institutional places primarily devoted to the presentation of an object or event, and now left over like empty stage sets: an empty plinth in a museum, a store system at another one, a deserted lecture hall, a white screen at an artist’s residency complex, and the photograph of the historic building where the artist’s residency was located before its demolition. Being devoid of all theatricality, the images show us the ‘behind-the-scenes’, what remains of the spectacle.