From the Top, On Repeat aims to open a space for an alternative way of studying repetition and imitation, which artists often adopt in their practices, through movement, materiality, language, and rhythm. Taking repetition as a base, originality, copying, and appropriation that are inherent in art making, are being re-assessed in the selection of artworks. Under the influence of these natural connections, the exhibition offers a visual, auditive as sensual experience of the inescapable temporal, physical, and mental differences that emerge as a result.While the act of repetition distances itself from the original, through disruptions, mistakes, failures, and echoes, the expected consequences on the other side lead to unde- sired paths, in other words, to the endangerment of meaning.
The exhibition aims to decompose centralized structures, examining the layers down to their smallest or highest units through imitation, repetition or reproduction in order to understand their material and immaterial significance. It also questions where this may lead one regarding culture, matter, gesture, language, or mind while asking, whether a whole that is divided into its fragments can maintain its originality when put back together and at what point would it be possible to break the systematic cycle?
From the Top, On Repeat, exhibition view, 2023, Zilberman, Istanbul
In Left Thumb, Guido Casaretto investigates upon the relationship between culture and a uniform structure that gets de-identified through repetition; by forming orecchiette pasta from clay, he exercises a series of mechanical hand and body movements. In the video An Echo Too Late, Merve Ertufan invites the viewer to a journey through sound and language, by narrating and telling the memories of a woman who lost the ability to recognise her own face, to reveal the random echoes and riddled deep waters of subconsciousness that linger in the back of mind. Opening a new discourse towards authenticity and copy that lies within the nature of repetition. Copycat’s Strife with the Original presents a text in which the copycat/imitator compares him/herself with the original/authentic. Zeynep Kayan focuses on exploring the repetitive structural setup of the variations she creates in her artistic practice, while underlining the impossibility of repeating a movement exactly due to both temporal and bodily differences. This attitude of hers becomes apparent in her series one one two one two three: fabric and the series Temporary Sameness: fabric in this exhibition. MissPrint, produced by Erinç Seymen specifically for this exhibition, looks into the issue of repetition from three different manners: the first one refers to the method of screen printing that inherits a repetition in itself; the second one is Seymen’s use of letter stamps as col- lection objects, especially taking a closer look on the misprints and their values being created in the exactly same moment where repetition is interrupted; and lastly, references to his own artistic history by bringing an old work back with a differ- ent interpretation. Yasemin Özcan takes the viewer on a biographical journey throughout her artistic practice in Re-Struct, while defining the conceptually and visually recurring elements in her practice through her intense relationship she has developed with green color, soil, terracotta, labor and literature.
Guido Casaretto, Left Thumb, 2022, clay, dimensions variable
In her video An Echo Too Late, Merve Ertufantakes on the relationship between repetition and time, memory and language with a different approach. The video, following a story of a woman that fails to recognize herself, discloses a cognitive structure narrated through echoes in the labyrinths of consciousness and the obscure paths of mind. By including the two mystical personas Narcissus and Princess Ateh in this series of echoes and overlapping helical spins, Ertufan reveals the nurturing relationships between the past and present, fiction and reality. At the same time, the work invites the viewer into the personal space one creates while defining and identifying him/herself, scrutinizing the mental state between an acting “self” and an observing “self”. Furthermore, opening a new discourse towards authenticity and copy that lies within the act of repetition, Copycat’s Strife with the Original presents a text in which the copycat compares him/herself with the original. Trapped between feelings of inferiority and his/her effort to find his/her own value, the copycat reflects with a tragicomic series of thoughts on his/her inevitable position: always a step behind the original. Thus, this probably is the only time the copycat becomes the original. The artist presents the copycat-original relationship through a text written on 999 A4 sized copies, alongside the original printing plate.
From the Top, On Repeat, exhibition view, 2023, Zilberman, Istanbul
Zeynep Kayan focuses on exploring the repetitive structural setup of the variations she creates in her artistic practice. Concentrating on experimentation and coincidence, she operates through the idea of “(re)creating something new through something old”. Her artistic process is inspired by movement, change and repetition. In her last exhibition one one two one two three in Berlin, Zeynep Kayan was influenced by the choreographer Trisha Brown describing her ideas about repetition, variation and rhythm shown as in her performance Accumulation. In one one two one two three, Kayan brought daily gestures such as rubbing, pressing, holding and tapping, while reducing them to a single movement together with its own repetitive sound. The performative sequence of Kayan’s act and each distinct moment creates tension between the seen and the expected, the movement and continuation observed in the presentation. This approach becomes further apparent in her video From the series one one two one two three: fabric. At times the artist’s movements get limited, she systematically changes the gesture, creating a new motional variation. As a method, repetition intends to move from failure to success. Kayan underlines the impossibility of repeating a physiologically identical movement due to both temporal and bodily differences. In From the series ‘Temporary Sameness’: scissors, the artist films herself cutting a wide white paper in half with a pair of scissors. Although the cutting movement comes to an end, the action itself continues, turning into an infinite repetition.
From the Top, On Repeat, exhibition view, 2023, Zilberman, Istanbul
Erinç Seymen reproduces his 2019 painting Monster in MissPrint as screen prints. The work, produced as a large-scale and multiple screen printing, this time takes the form of a postage stamp and references the mass printing technique of stamp production. It examines the shift in value of misprinted stamps once considered as worthless turning into valuable collection items. This reaction towards the misprints perhaps stems from an excitement of interruption of industrialization, and the aggressiveness and continuity of mass production. Designed as a large-scale stamp installation, silk-screen prints test the viewer’s attention. Among tens of uniformly produced prints, only one differs. This is not only a play on technique, but it conceptually connects to the story of Monster which was about the adults’ constant search for pathological symptoms or faults in children by deforming the image of a child. Hiding this persistent and repetitive mentality on either side of the lens, the artwork leaves the identity of the monster unclear. Spelling error, mental error and printing error are embodied in a single work.
Erinç Seymen, MissPrint, 2022, screen print on paper, 63 x 41 cm (each)
Re-Struct is a new sculpture where Yasemin Özcan reuses concepts and visual elements that repeatedly appear in her long years of artistic practice. Taking the viewer on an autobiographical journey, Re-Struct represents Özcan’s training in ceramics, her visual and metaphorical use of the color green, and her intense relationship with soil, terracotta, labor and literature. Compiling from one another Re-Struct references the work called While Exiting the World, she had produced for the 2018 Cappadox* edition, also reminds us about Colon (2015). “Her şeyi hatırlamak bir tür deliliktir” (Remembering everything is a form of madness), which scrutinizes the memory of time, appears on the mass produced ceramic tiles that hold this column.Taking the cultural understanding as base which asserts; “if you repeat something forty times, it will come true” the artist questions: “if I repeat this sentence forty times, will I forget? will I go mad? or will I remember?” Within this net of familiar thoughts, Özcan draws attention to ceramic’s tendency to repeat the same form, its relation to mass production and craftsmanship, and the path that leads to mastery. Hence, in Re-Struct the artist reconstructs a structure collected from different ceramic ateliers in Bilecik, Çorum and Istanbul. In the sky-reaching ceramic sculpture, the industrial and non-industrial, the arts and crafts, the fine and the low, the glazed and the unglazed carry one another on repeat of each other.
From the Top, On Repeat, exhibition view, 2023, Zilberman, Istanbul
Instead of talking about repetition, the exhibition From the Top, On Repeat reasserts the form that difference takes in a repetitive process, the unexpectedness in change, certain structural and temporal intervals through the artists’ interpretation.
*Cappadox 2017 Contemporary Art Exhibition “Ways Out from the World” was on show in Cappadocia between 18 May – 11 June, 2017, Curator: Fulya Erdemci and Assistant Curator: Kevser Güler.
Merve Ertufan, An echo too late, 2016-2020, Single channel video, 15’00”
Exhibition credit: Courtesy of the artists and Zilberman, From the Top, On Repeat, Zilberman Selected, Istanbul, 2023
Photo Credit: Kayhan Kaygusuz
Banner drawing: Antonio Cosentino
Banner Design: Gürem Özcan
About the exhibition; (tur. only)
https://www.unlimitedrag.com/post/cift-dikis-tekrar-bir-nakis-bastan
For more information;
https://www.zilbermangallery.com/from-the-top-on-repeat-tr-e327.html