Hale Güngör’s solo exhibition will take place between March 1 – 3, 2013 at Pg Art Gallery in Tophane, Istanbul.
Having spent about half of her lifetime outside her home country, not speaking her mother tongue, and holding the status of “the foreigner”; the questioning of belonging versus alienation, as well as the concern of how to reconstitute a home have come to surface in the artist’s paintings. Whether living or inanimate, elements in Güngör’s works are more than often where they do not belong. Through the use of physical and intellectual collage, she queries ease and disturbance in the cultural sense while using the space in between reason and oddity as a guideline.
In her latest works to be seen in this exhibition, Güngör investigates in-between spaces in order to channel the un-rooted mind of a migrant, making references to Hegel’s concept of “The Other” and using animals as symbolic suggestions of non-belonging.
As Svetlana Boym once said in Immigrant Arts, Diasporic Intimacy, and Alternative Solidarity: “The home that one leaves and the home away from home that one creates sometimes have more in common than one would like to admit. A portable home away from home, which an immigrant ferociously guards, preserves an imprint of his or her cultural motherland.”
The migrant’s dwelling has become something new: something more than just a home away from home and something more than the motherland, which has long been visualized, idealized, and thus, altered in the mind. It is now a hybrid of two utopias in one.
Born in 1981 in Adana, Hale Güngör spent the majority of her childhood in a small town in Switzerland before moving back to Istanbul in 1989. She studied fine arts at Parsons School of Design in Paris (2004) and painting at Pratt Institute in New York (2009) before relocating to Stockholm, where she currently continues to live and work, in 2010.
