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26.09.2024 - 02.11.2024

As part of Aslıhan Kaplan Bayrak’s solo exhibition inspired by the “Star-Island” duality in E. A. Poe’s poem, we invite you to our opening on Thursday, September 26th at Labirent Sanat to discover the meaning of Aslıhan’s recent paintings, watercolors and video works together.

With the awareness that an independent, isolated existence in the universe is impossible, the island is the second origin that will provide us with a source to start over in order to create a new reality. When we change our perspective, the island offers an intellectual perspective that can help us better understand the interconnectedness of everything. In the simplest terms, if the sea level were to drop significantly, many islands would be seen to be connected to the continents.

What places the island at the center of this text and exhibition is its topological and conceptual richness. Thinking about an island is also being interested in how it makes you feel. The island is also related to the dualities created by finitude and vastness with its physical structure; the feeling of light created by the moon shining on the sea on a calm night. Novalis must have experienced such a moment when the inner and the inner worlds meet and intertwine when he says that the seat of the soul is where the outer and the inner worlds meet.

The first determination of the reality of a real being is that this being is somewhere. Spatial continuity is where the complex relations of all potential things are located. The island is also a natural matrix where all events take place with the vital mobility of its unique fauna and flora behind its deserted and static appearance.

The island is a place where relationality is clearly observed in all forms of existence, where the transition of nature is felt in a layered manner, where the harmony born from the union of land and water surrounds the atmosphere with changing frequencies, where vitality is the stage with its suspended temporality and fragility, and the fluctuations make a simultaneous pressure on our senses while bringing us closer to our own bodies; With the air we breathe into our lungs, the breeze brushing our skin as it passes, the whisper in our ear, and this sense of multiplicity that sensation splits the inside and outside, it purifies us from all empty judgments, opinions, and beliefs and draws us into the nature we belong to.

Aslıhan's new paintings, which move away from the horizontal-vertical spatial architectural elements that surround the canvas surface in layers and the paintings that are generally perceived as mathematical and fictional, which have been dominant in her ongoing art works for nearly twenty years; instead of rational, solidified artistic forms, a sense of fluidity and transparency dominate. Aslıhan carries her creative process, which she continues without being bound to a certain material, technique, and form, towards innovation without falling into repetition; the intellectual processes that form the background of her works also undergo a transformation.

In the "Star-Island" exhibition, Aslıhan uses the possibilities of painting to explore the sensory and physical phenomenon between the ground we step on and the sky. When we look at the sky covering the island, the trillions of kilometers between the stars we see and us who watch them with admiration shakes our perception of space-time, while we can actually understand that our world is at zero level on the astronomical scale. Such an encounter or awareness questions the illusion of ownership we fall into in the process of understanding life/the universe, and also becomes the basis for us to confront the shadow/dark aspects of our existence.

When I saw Aslıhan’s watercolor paintings, many of which I know she worked on while in nature, which we brought together under the title “Star-Island”, her paintings made in her studio with the imagery of nature and the island in them, and her video installation called Bird-Fish, I felt that she was leaning towards a narrative language that was as simple as poetry, in her own words, free of excess.

You can see Aslıhan Kaplan Bayrak’s solo exhibition titled “Star-Island” at Labirent Sanat between September 26 and November 2, 2024.

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26.09.2024 - 02.11.2024

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