Ali Şentürk

Ali Şentürk (b. 1985, Ankara) completed his university education and master's degree in Sculpture at Hacettepe University. His artistic practice includes various media such as sculpture, painting, photography, video, and performance. He conveys the life and experiences of himself but mostly of the others through the interpretational, metaphorical and fictional language of art. Şentürk’s sculptures, highly influenced by his intensive education, often play on the principal values such as light and shadow, space and volume beyond their content. And in his drawings and paintings, the projections of the emotions that have a place in his personal history can be traced, such as movies, memories, poems. In his first solo exhibition, he transferred his drawings onto canvases, and used wires to represent the spirals of thought beyond the boundaries of the surface of the canvas. In the following years, during the transition from canvas to paper, the drawings transformed from wire-like appearances to simplified lines. The repetitive units are a ritual for the artist where sometimes they lead to works in which the details disappear between the dense lines, and sometimes the lines are reduced to the point that they become invisible.

In addition to his drawings, Şentürk's artistic practice also includes research-based projects. Historical and Geological Corrections aim to imagine and integrate the underground parts of rocks that have existed in nature for thousands of years, or to repair broken parts of the rock. Another series titled I Never Promised You a Rose Garden is a semi-fictional documentation; consisting of photos, hospital reports, patterns, and a murder mystery, it traces the story of a mental patient based on a newspaper article published in the 1960s, and retells it as the artist's own story. Şentürk takes on the role of storyteller in such projects. According to Walter Benjamin's "The Storyteller", the storyteller draws from experience and contributes to the oral tradition; Şentürk's works also follow a similar path, always adding a contemporary perspective and new value to the story theme. Operation Public Space, which began in 2013 and is still ongoing, focuses on monument sculpture murders committed in public spaces. It includes nearly all the news of sculptures broken, attacked, or removed between 2000 and 2018, welcoming the spectator to a crime-story.