"An individual [only] has their hand and their mind."
—St. Thomas Aquinas
Five artists working with different media tell stories of people producing and changing at Pg Art Gallery.
When did a person become human? When did he begin to think, to express himself, to create and to change? When and how?
The "hand" is the initiator of becoming human. The individual using his hands, produce and transform. With his altered mind, he cannot see "thing"s for what they are. Before, he used to think the way he sees; he has now obliterated all limits, realized his dreams and dominated nature by intervening. The consciousness and mind of a person using his hand have been liberated; he has overcome nature's determinations and he now changes nature.
Burcu Aksoy, Jerome Symons, Shiri Shamir, Can Ertas, Burak Bedenlier, Didem Ünlü, Gonca Sezer and Aysegul Suter include the "hand" conceptually in their works, touching on the individual's psychological, sociological and anthropological existentialism. Each tells stories of the "intervening," "changing" individual through their unique language.
Ayşegül Süter, focuses on the individual's interventions to their own life as well as the possible consequences of these interventions through video animations. The artist bases her works on the visuality of a game we all play as children and iterates the chaos we create with our own hands, in our own worlds.
In Burcu Aksoy's mostly black and white photo-collages, the body becomes a symbol and each photograph tells a story about a life that is delineated by the very image. Physical and mental deformation, chaotic mobility is directed towards our psychological states—without being intercepted by the familiar consciousness and willpower—through images that betray violent as well as aesthetic concerns. However, the images brought out by the unconscious, formed by mental states, that go beyond and articulate the perception of the quotidian, form the modus operandi of the artist's works and designs.
Burak Bedenlier's amorphic figures in his works on canvas, overstep the boundaries of reality through the text and images that he utilizes, while the internal connotations that relate to our "real" life charge our thoughts.
With his idiosyncratic style, Can Ertaş blurs the distinctions between two and three dimensionality. The works included in this exhibition present a perspective to the increasingly mechanized, sterile world of man while with his finger print, the artist self-identifies.
With the work on canvas, "Ruya Seyri" Didem Ünlü looks at the beginning of life; for this collage, she drew a newborn on Iraqi newspapers. The artist sees every birth as a new "hope" although the capitalist world is struggling with war and hunger and is pregnant with new destructions.
Gonca Sezer seeks to answer how we look at the world and how we create meaning for ourselves by juxtaposing different marks that we make with our hands. With "Action" the artist focuses on creation as a means and the "hand" as a tool of expression.
Jerome Symons shows the viewer hands that come together. Even though people are destroying the world with their hands, no matter what the conditions are, our hands that come together can overcome any obstacle…
