One No One and One Hundred Thousand

Click for press release.

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Labirent Sanat, between 24 June – 31 July 2021, is hosting the exhibition titled “One No One and One Hundred Thousand” featuring works by Gülfem Kessler, İsmet Doğan, Sabire Susuz, Sefa Çakır, Serdar Oruç and Tansu Köse, focusing on the “face” with different intellectual approaches.

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Our face; a thin, sensitive and inviting surface that separates our inner world from the outside(rs)… Moreover, it is slippery that often hides more than it seems, changes over time, differs according to the perceiver... The face is a relative and indeterminate field of forces that distinguishes us from the others with its uniqueness in fingerprint precision (although we carry the same limbs in the same arrangement).

 

In The Nature of the Gods, Cicero likens the face to a castle where all the senses reşide and the eyes to the watchers of this castle. In this aspect, while watching the face, the viewer; while being sensed, the senser has a privileged position. With its bidirectional structure the face is the place where human existence gains meaning. While our experiences and lives correspond to the authenticity of our faces; the social and cultural elements we live in determine the movement of our face. However, none of us can see our own face without a reflective device. This makes the gaze of others superior to ours when it comes to our own face.

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Moscarda, the main character of Luigi Pirandello's book “One, No One and One Hundred Thousand”, which inspired the name of the exhibition; one day, while watching himself in front of the mirror, falls into an identity crisis when his wife reveals the curvature of his nose and other flaws in his body. He realizes that this person "me" he sees when he stands in front of the mirror every day is not actually the same "me" with first known to his wife, and then to other people in his life. There are thousands of Moscardas with different identities for everyone he knows; he begins to question which of these reflects his "me" and how well he knows the face he sees in the mirror. So, is it really himself that a person sees in the mirror? Or is it the self he wants to be? The key question that initiates the unraveling in Moscarda's life is “who am I if I am not the person I have always believed I am for others?”

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In the book, Pirandello constructs the search for reality phenomenon, which is an inevitable part of our lives, on identity crisis within the framework of uncertainty and relativity concepts. Even though each of us has only one physical face or body, we exist in as many realities as the people we contact with. There are multiple "we"s in other people's perspectives, over which we have no control and which are often completely different from what we think.

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The exhibition “One No One and One Hundred Thousand” brings together the works of Gülfem Kessler, İsmet Doğan, Sabire Susuz, Sefa Çakır, Serdar Oruç and Tansu Köse, which they have produced with different perspectives on the "face"; an indispensable issue of science, philosophy and art for centuries can be seen at the new venue of Labirent Sanat in Tepebaşı between 24 June – 31 July 2021.

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Artists:

Gülfem Kessler

İsmet Doğan

Sabire Susuz

Sefa Çakır

Serdar Oruç

Tansu Köse