Pg Basement is pleased to host Sesil Beatris Kalaycıyan’s first solo project titled “Lost” between 29 May and 22 June, 2019.
“I was born in 1980. I was a child in 80s, and a child and teenager in 90s. They said I was a military coup kid and I grew up with this phrase, without understanding how it affected me. They said I was part of a lost generation and I grew up with this phrase, without knowing what I had lost. I was a child and teenager in 80s and 90s, without being aware of the disengagements and devastations these years have created. I was born and grew up in a period in which a silent and lost generation was in the making. And I was, essentially, a child of this generation.”
Although the word lost was used to signify actual lost people in 90s, it refers in this project to the children who grew up in that period, such as the artist Sesil Beatris Kalaycıyan, as the children of that lost generation, and why and how that lost generation was created. Therefore, her works are dominated by the feeling of being lost as well as moods of fear, anxiety, punishment and mourning. In this project consisting of five parts, the key and repetitive element is the childhood shoes of the artist. Just the shoes she had been wearing in the period in which the lost generation was in the making. As Kalaycıyan puts it, “my feet and my shoes; these are my traces, the proofs of my existence. Last but not least, these are the proofs of my loss, my being lost since they constitute the sole element that remained of my body, that express me. They are my traces which had been a part of my body, one and the same with my body.”
***
Sesil Beatris Kalaycıyan (b. 1980, Istanbul): The artist has completed her undergraduate and graduate studies at Mimar Sinan University, Faculty of Fine Arts, Department of Sculpture, and continues with her doctorate studies. Kalaycıyan whose works have been shown in many group exhibitions lives and works in Istanbul.
