Same New Day allows us to think about some of the images we are used to seeing in Volkan Aslan's art practice, together with the reflections of authority in everyday life. Through the artist's collages, watercolors and figurines, which are composed of found images and objects that at first glance seem incompatible with each other, we become aware of a feeling that pervades the entire exhibition: the kind of feeling that the climate crisis, capital, the destruction of social memory, the unmournable dead, the forbidden sense of belonging leave on people. In the geography we live in, the works that deal with this feeling, which corresponds to the spirit of the time - on the one hand unique and on the other monolithic - point both to a makeshift lack of tradition and to the possibility of a new hope.
A child hugging a tree, a woman carrying her belongings, a tiger with the sea under its arm...The Self-Portrait series, a combination of two-and three-dimensional images, focuses, as the title suggests, on Aslan's own practice and the ways in which an artist living today survives. Same New Day, a gigantic version of Aslan's familiar watercolors, gives its name to the exhibition. The color that fades or intensifies through the clouds symbolizes a familiar but somehow a new day's feeling of repetition. The zeitgeist of the exhibition is further emphasized by the porcelain sculptures that the artist first breaks and then pairs and assembles in different ways. Each creating their own world of meaning, the figurines not only challenge dominant regimes of representation but also frustrate the gaze directed at them without hiding their raggedness.
The feeling in question that exists in an abstract form in all works comes into existence in the videos “Best Wishes” and “Stay Safe” through letters written to an unknown reader. The images accompanying these two letters keep the record of the time we live in and make the viewer a part of the dialogue that the exhibition initiates.
