Reysi Kamhi meets viewers at Pg Art Gallery with her second solo exhibition titled Skipping the Depictions.
In this new exhibition, the artist creates various representations through urban experience, certain spaces within cities, and the relationships between the people and objects that inhabit these spaces. Kamhi continues the process—an important part of her artistic practice—of transferring photographs of a place or an experience onto canvas.
Skipping the Depictions in a sense portrays spaces that continue to exist within the modern city. In the works included in this exhibition, Kamhi focuses on seeing and re-presenting shops, their owners, and many objects (clocks, hats, old machines, etc.) as if they were part of the landscape of a novel.
In the face of the transformative power of history, the spaces that continue to exist within the city—those we believe make a neighborhood a neighborhood and Istanbul truly Istanbul—emerge, as Pierre Nora describes, from an impulse of preservation born from the awareness of the absence of memory. By pointing to the memory of the shops belonging to long-standing professions and the people who inhabit them, the artist emphasizes these spaces that have managed to survive over time. Through the depictions of professions that are increasingly overlooked and the places that sustain them, Kamhi is in fact also creating visual records of a particular period. Yet the memory she represents, produces, and questions is not only grounded in reality but also shaped by an open-ended and personal perspective.
The exhibition, which will also include interviews conducted by Rita Ender for Agos newspaper, can be seen at Pg Art Gallery between September 27 and October 24, 2012.