TURKISH PAVILION

Curator: Levent Çalýkoðlu - independent curator

Artist: Irfan Önurmen, Temur Koran, Mustafa Rasit Horasan, GulIlgaz , Denizhan Özer and Ali Mahmut Demirel

HYBRID TALES

We are experiencing a shift in a cultural paradigm in which geographical boundaries and modernist maps have become meaning less. We breathe in a Now in which hierarchies are being broken, periphery and center have exchanged places, time and space have been rescued from monotony, and art is being re-erected by a plurality of alternatives to art. Instead of grand ideas and narrations we give importance to more modest narrations and stories that intersect our lives horizontally. We have come to be lieve that art is not something with conductivity but rather a social force that re-establishes communication. At a time when the relationship between marginality and authority is being completely redefined, both an artist's sense of personal belonging and the manner in which he conceptualizes the world are losing their integrality. Today's artist is not so much someone who produces any longer but rather is becoming someone who transforms or imparts new meanings to that which has already been produced . We are speaking here of a type of artist who, instead of trying to tidy culture up, spots the opportunities in culture and sets their likely potentials into motion. Perhaps it is because of this that the geographically transplanted meanings of the stories that a work of art attempts to indicate are always based on an incomplete or mistaken understanding. In a sea of possibilities that have been freed from their own etymons and in which the story-teller has been shorn of his identity, the ta l es that get told become hybrids as well . Instead of a single, totalitarian story, we begin to speak of the existence of a “something” that lacks borders and is nourished by different languages of _expression, codes, and meanings. A work of art undulating among cultural signs displays not just its own traces but those of the adulterated world of its transmitter. The rift between the reasons why the story emerged and the influences of “the other” geography provides us with an opportunity to reposition a work of art as a new reality. A potential state of hybridism in which story, teller, and listener have exchanged places and everything is amenable to being reread anew is the new dynamism of today's art.

Levent Çalýkoðlu - independent curator