KRANK Art will host “Home is My Heart” Exhibition by Güneş Terkol till Saturday 18 November.
From the organizer:
KRANK Art Gallery hosts Güneş Terkol with the exhibition “Home is My Heart”. Terkol’s banner project prepared for Art Night London and its documentation that will be exhibited for the first time in Turkey could be viewed at the gallery until Saturday, November 18th. In addition, Bige Örer will perform an artist talk with Güneş Terkol at November 13th.
An annual contemporary art festival in London, Art Night has launched a project in which a leading cultural institution and an independent curator are invited to an extraordinary location in London to work on a project that explores the history, culture and architecture of that area. Art Night, which was held this year in East London on July 1st, was curated by Fatoş Üstek and realised in collaboration with the Whitechapel Gallery. Following a one-month residency in London, Güneş Terkol, who was invited to the project from Turkey, was commissioned to create a new work for the Art Night. In Terkol’s 7th Banner project, Home is My Heart / Evim Kalbimdir, which was realised as a socially engaged practice, diverse groups of participants collaborated with the artist. Terkol worked with a group of residents from Middlesex Street Estate. One of the two housing estates allocated to immigrants in the City of London, Middlesex Street Estate consists of a 23-storey tower block and a square of family flats and bedsits built between 1965-1970 by the Corporation of London Architect’s Department, with playgrounds and garages, all arranged around a podium landscaped by the residents. The Estate contains 270 properties, 70% of which are being used as social housing by various minorities for several generations.
Through a series of sewing workshop the participants produced a large-scale banner of 1.4 m x 3 m, titled “Home is My Heart / Evim Kalbimdir”. The banner that was embroidered onto a backdrop designed by Güneş Terkol reveals the residents’ hopes, dreams and their relationships with the neighbourhood and their neighbours through a poetic narrative full of emotion and labour. The resulting work was installed in the window of Sir John Cass School of Art, Architecture and Design (The Cass), one of the six schools of London Metropolitan University.
Within the scope of the project there was also an audio-visual performance. A processional chorus, called the ‘Bird Band’, organised with the participation of the residents, walked the streets of the city playing bird whistles and carrying the banner.
Another exciting outcome of the project was that the banner was enlarged to 4 m x 12 m with the support of the City of London Cooperation and made into a permanent mural on the exterior wall of the Middlesex Street Estate.
As part of the project, Terkol’s “Desire Passed by Band / Arzu Yalayıp Geçti Bandosu” series created in 2010 was also exhibited. Each one of the life-size depictions of 27 fictional characters from a variety of diverse social classes in the series represented an individual from society, and by being placed together their social identities were emphasized. By exhibiting “Desire Passed by Band” alongside “Home is My Heart” in the windows of The Cass building on the occasion of the Art Night, the harmony of social togetherness was underscored through two separate bands created at different times.
“The banner is important to me as a concept because before when people used to protest, they would get together before the protest to create a banner, this allowed them to discuss ideas and politics with each other,” says Güneş Terkol, whose works created with found materials, particularly soft textured materials, are shaped by the personal history, the environment, the relationships, and the social conditions that she encounters. Her ambiguous characters are the protagonists of a story without a definite beginning or an end, in a narrative with no narrator. These stories appear in her sewing pieces, in her sketches, and sometimes in her musical performances.
Güneş Terkol has seven banner projects, including “Home is My Heart”. These banners that have emerged as a result of workshops she has organised in different geographies from China to Antakya, from Istanbul to Berlin, in a sense depict the dreams, the fears, the worries about the future, and the current situations of the women, the immigrants, the young people, and various other fractions living in these different geographies.
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For more information, be sure to visit the official gallery page.
info@krankartgallery.com
+90 212 243 57 86
Images sourced via KRANK Art.
Tomtom Gardens No: 8 Tomtom Kaptan Sok. Beyoğlu / ISTANBUL
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