Curated by Selen Ansen, the exhibition A Halo of Blackness Upon Our Heads is a collection of Ahmet Doğu İpek’s art during 2020-2022 that explores naturalistic events exceeding the power of humanity. Spanning across various mediums, İpek’s work includes abstractions that illustrate the inescapable cycle of destruction and creation. Available until Sunday, 29th of January at Gallery 1 in Arter. More information and tickets available via the exhibition page.
From the organizer:
A Halo of Blackness Upon Our Heads brings together works Ahmet Doğu İpek has produced with various mediums between 2020–2022 in the context of this exhibition. Stemming from natural phenomena such as sandstorms, volcanic eruptions, landslides and sun eclipses; the paintings, drawings, installations and video works gathered here interpret by way of abstraction awe-inspiring events that excede human scale and are endowed with the capacity to dazzle or appal us.
These works, which build a space for mutual interaction between matter and emotions, fiction and reality, the natural and the artificial, the tangible and the transient, invite us to step in a field that allows for perception and witnessing, where various scales collide. A Halo of Blackness Upon Our Heads bonds with phenomena that not only stem from the absence of light but also continually produce darkness. In doing so, the works on display disclose that which is invisible to our naked eyes / that which our hands cannot grasp – the sky, the sun, darknesses, subterranean forces and activities, tectonic movements, buried memories, past and gone lives, not-yet-born events, the infinitesimal, the immensely big, the far-off or the too-near.
The exhibition points out that in the face of the utterly terrifying magnificence of such phenomena one can only indulge in their contemplation. Layered with concepts of time, void, life, movement, cyclicity, death and dissolution, the elements that compose these scenes are endowed with weightlessness and fugacity. The contrasting feelings of heaviness and ineluctability that they provoke in us convey into the exhibition space the climate formed by the macro and micro phenomena of the times we live in while abstracting it at the same time.
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Image sourced via the organizers.
More information available through the exhibition page.
Yenişehir, Irmak Cd. No:13, 34435 Beyoğlu/İstanbul
