OPENWORK
To all this rigidity we call the world.
To definitions, with corners and walls to collide with.
To all teachings that define man only as a body confining him to a body.
All boundaries that turn ‘the one' into ‘the other.'
To all forms and monuments that reduce existence only to a body, sanctify this constriction, and immortalize it.
A gentle question mark to all this drama and a subtle invitation to lightness, to the wind, to the center; OpenWork.
OpenWork is a performative spatial installation, a theatrical exhibition. It is shaped around the metaphors of "consciousness and thresholds," and it revolves around discussing these concepts, which have represented power, belonging, boundary setting, and social hierarchy throughout human history, on an existential basis.
Abstract doors and the plan created by surfaces that function like instruments turn into an experience of 'exchange' with the visitor's touch. The installation intentionally emphasizes monumentality and grandeur, but as visitors interact with the space, this untouchability gives way to an auditory quality and flexibility. This play is also a gentle question mark to the emerging new world right before us.
Experience, Curation
An overcrowded monument, condensed even more as if holding a mirror to the crowded heart of the city.
We are welcomed by a relative and continuously flowing crowd. We cannot fully grasp the state of being inside and outside.
Surfaces that could be considered as solid behave like illusions as we approach them.
We struggle to place the integrity of the relationshi pbetween time, space, the city, and the "other" into our presenec.
It is this orientation effort that makes us a part of the installation.
We touch the thresholds.
The thresholds respond to us.
All of this creates an unpredictable and unrecordable relationship, an exhibition experience consumed at the moment of its creation. And our relationship with the city, as well as this theatrical monument which hangs on it, becomes an observation, an experiment. We have two types of visitors, the one who observes and the one that experiences. And an exhibition consumed at the moment of its creation in each of their minds.
We stay here for a while.
And then we too leave.
The doors do not deliberately connect with each other to form a unity or create ideal corridors by separating as complete passages. Instead, they are sized to squeeze the visitor, performing all this congestion through a physical experience. We get stuck in these "i n t e r s p a c e s " at times. And we reveal all the structure without hiding its technical elements. This is part of the exhibition and makes the visitor oscillate between fiction and reality in their subconscious. It is important to facilitate the interaction between the consciousness and and the matter and in this context, all the technical connections of the installation are manifest.
Open Work, after being exhibited in the courtyard of the historic Somerset House during the London Biennale in June 2023, won the "Public Award" among 47 countries and 22 universities. It was interpreted as the "Last Monument" by various contemporary art authorities and gained significant coverage in the international press from the first day it was exhibited. This urban installation, which is a gentle question mark to all monuments and representations, was considered a manifesto throughout the exhibition. Immediately after this exhibition, it was invited to the 20th-anniversary special selection of the London Design Festival and exhibited as a 'suspended monument' on the historic River Thames, in the London skyline, with its curation defined as 'a thought on themes of place and belonging.' With this exhibition, it became one of 30 works listed in The Red Book, listing the most influential works of the last 20 years, prepared under the jury of valuable institutions such as the Mayor of London and the Victoria & Albert Museum.
Then, upon the invitation of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the Republic of Turkey for the 100th Anniversary of our Republic, the work was opened for visitors at the Atatürk Cultural Center. Based on the emphasis on belonging and the city at its core, it is a two-faced exhibition, a tightly packed theatrical monument installation in the heart of the city, with a special curation called "To this rigidity we call the world."
