“The labyrinth is made so that whoever enters it will stray and get lost. But the labyrinth also poses the visitor a challenge: that he should reconstruct the plan of it and dissolve its power. If he succeeds, he will have destroyed the labyrinth; for one who has passed through it, no labyrinth exists.”[1]

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Labirent Sanat is hosting the “Crystal Labyrinth” exhibition, the result of the “Dream Maps” project curated and conducted by Arzu Arbak, involving the participation of Aslıhan Kaplan Bayrak, Aylin Leblebici Öztürk, Meryem Güldürdak, Öznur Eren and Suzan Bayazıt between 7 November - 7 December 2024.

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Reading, listening, watching, speaking, being silent, touching. The "meaning" distilled from the connections between overlooked pieces of everyday experience creates the present; it transforms and changes as new knowledge and experience are added or eliminated. The webs woven between the pieces are not seen, they whisper. Subtly heard in dreams, coincidences, and places where the subconscious can seep through.

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In “Dream Maps”, designed by Arzu Arbak to create a collective production and thinking space covering a five-month period, artists constructed a map using pieces from visual arts, literature, philosophy, cinema, music, and the relationality between these pieces. The interconnected dream/thought map, constructed with all these pieces intertwining, attracting, or repelling each other, and the discussions held with the map mediated the emergence of the works.

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Aslıhan creates labyrinths that astonish the gaze, where new details are captured with every look, echoing one another and giving the impression of having passed through the same place before. She weaves webs of parallel temporalities.

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From a bird’s eye view, the labyrinth resembles a face with intertwined features. It is as if the face is swallowed by the void. The blurred, fading faces in Aylin’s photographs are no longer evidence; they echo the uncanniness brought on by the unknown. The void finds its meaning in the “face”.

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In an uncanny journey, discovering first the “Inner Space” and enabling all the body's senses are necessary. In Meryem's photo-performances, the dialogue with her surroundings and the new language she discovers are far from the linear rigidity of world definitions; they twist and stretch. They create lines of flight in the labyrinth.

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Every crossroad and threshold require confrontation and transformation for the traveler. Öznur's hybrid approaches, born from the combination of photography and the gesture of her hand, depict the threshold-spaces in the labyrinth and reveal the richness it contains.

Using the reflective and refractive possibilities of crystals, their color changes as a metaphor, Suzan proposes looking at history from different perspectives. And she adds a crystal layer to the labyrinth.

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The artists' suggestion for the dizziness brought on by the feeling of plural, infinite, void, far from the default system, is a crystal labyrinth. Because the only way to challenge the labyrinth is to build a new labyrinth.

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The book “Crystal Labyrinth”, featuring the works that emerged from the project, will also be available at Labirent Sanat throughout the exhibition.

 

[1] Calvino, Italo. (2013). Görünmez Kentler, Yapı Kredi Yayınları.