Why do artists create works in series?
The exhibition Works in Series deals with the concept of seriality through a selection of gallery artists’ serial works. Bahar Yürükoğlu, Basim Magdy, Deniz Aktaş, Fayçal Baghriche, Gökçe Erhan, Gözde İlkin and Serkan Demir, deepen their artistic research as they use repetition as a structure and we witness how artists build linear and non-linear narratives through iterations.
Although seeming in visual alignment, the works in this exhibition come together to underline the contextual and visual uniqueness within the same aesthetic strategy and how different artists have worked in a similar understanding of series throughout their art making.
In her photographic practice, Bahar Yürükoğlu intervenes isolated landscapes with artificial materials in order to question concepts like natural vs artificial or nature vs human-made and the tension between them. With a similar approach in her collage series titled Antarctica Interventions, we witness her research of form on found book pages that look like imaginary interventions as she does in her video and photographic practices.
Basim Magdy’s Every Subtle Gesture (2012-2017) series is composed of photographs from a personal archive, resembling the fragments of certain memories that do not necessarily relate to one another, accompanied by silver printed texts. His works challenge our perception of what is "real" and "cognizable" by using words and the aesthetic form of the artwork.
In his drawings, Deniz Aktaş digs into traumas in urban memory through carefully depicted images that bear the marks of urban transformation, forced evictions, demolishment and even the traces of social conflict. His series titled Unbound Variable depict forms that are difficult to place but leave us with familiar feelings of destruction.
Fayçal Baghriche participates in the exhibition with his series titled Family Friendly, formed of diptych magazine pages purchased in the UAE. These art magazines contain photographs of famous nude paintings that are covered/painted on by non-artists hands. His work points out, how the cultures we live in affect our actions and how the aesthetic and social values derived from the interaction of different cultures are reflected in our perception.
Interested in themes such as nature, human, ecology and recycling, Gökçe Erhan sets out from a similar theme in her series Plastic Values produced with plastic garbage bags and adhesive. In this series, she challenges our concept of "value" by portraying called in currencies using recycled material.
Gözde İlkin is inspired by the biological processes of wild plants in her series titled Nook. Colored with plant extracts, these papers inhabit plant and human figures that settle on the stains and aim to remind us the resilient characters of the weeds that manage to create a living space even in unexpected circumstances.
Serkan Demir uses history, tradition and cultural DNA in his creative process. He reinterprets phenomena, values and the socio-political situation in the Middle East from a contemporary perspective. In his series titled Hexagon-Pentagon, the artist refers to the political setting of the era by using the mathematical representations of geometric adornments of traditional Islamic architecture on found objects.
