Sanatçı Atölyesi of Nur Gürel, Aydın Büyüktaş and Burçin Erdi based in Yeldeğirmeni, will host an exhibition of 13 artists titled “Cabman Unfamiliar with Around Here” from Friday, 25 May through Friday, 1 June. The exhibition will include works in paintings, photography and other techniques analyzing the artificial processes the urban centers are being formed in today’s world.
From the organizer:
What kind of a relationship does exist between the organic urban centers and the multi-centricities of mega cities? How do the shopping centers emulating the marketplaces of the past or the new settlements called ‘new towns’ whose emergence is not based in organic cultural or commercial activity influence the society’s feelings of accountability and forms of communication?
To strengthen the bonds between artistic movements and spaces of artistic production while exploring the answers to these questions, the second exhibition by the ‘Three Day World’ initiave, ‘Cabman Unfamiliar with Around Here’ will be inaugurated on May 25th, Friday at the artist studio of Nur Gürel, Aydın Büyüktaş and Burçin Erdi based in Yeldeğirmeni.
The artificial processes of formation in today’s urban marketplaces and centers have currently replaced the organic processes of the past. While the older urban centers developed as a result of artistic-creative forces, underground cultures and commercial activities, these days we are surrounded by their bad imitations and by a cascade of shopping centers rising next to motorways. Even satellite towns and suburban settlements now generate their own suburbs, where grandiose towers worth billions of dollars emerge like cheap, junked mp3 players, devoid of the spatiality that would render their physical presence meaningful. All these developments subtract more and more aesthetic elements from our lives every day.
The city’s growth through erroneous additions like cancer cells, negatively affects our communication practices as well. The mega city carries the entire material as well as the moral burden of globalization and national economy, where the notions of neighbourhood and urbanization become traumatic for its dwellers, triggering a nostalgia for the small neighbourhood lifestyle of the past. But our struggle to sustain our daily routine while surviving the city’s fractal-like growth pushes us to solely embrace the region we are in, to feel responsible only for what remains within the limits of our perspectival horizon, and to ignore those areas relatively distant from us. Consequently, we end up becoming individuals with no concern for localism nor a proper understanding of universalism. We want the entire world to notice our neighbourhood; but we forget to create value worth showing to the world in it. We exclude the ghetto at the street right behind us from the wind of fellow townsmenship we grab fiercely onto.
Although we are on the same side, now we are cabmen unfamiliar with around here. We no longer accept responsibility for other places, for we don’t know how to get there anymore. Even the shopkeepers we turn to for address instructions as the navigation fails us, now have the right to make mistakes. And this a lot is like waking up every morning to a city we aren’t familiar with…
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For more information, you can check out the official website.
Address: Sanatçı Atölyesi, Süngertaşı sok. Yeldeğirmeni No:9/1
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