Ahmet Fazıl Yenice is an archtist who produces in the fields of placemaking, public programming, event-experience design, visual communication, storytelling, and curatorship. After getting a degree in architecture in 2020 from İstanbul Technical University, he has made it a principle not to take part in formations that do not contribute to people, animals, cities and nature in any way, and he has been continuing his professional career for over 2 years at ŞANALarc. Besides as an artist, he tries to engage with people or other actors, residents, or elements of the urban environment while exploring ephemeral situations, unique circumstances, and contextual experiences happening in the city. His works revolve around various formats such as projection, commentary, ode, or criticism through visual and curatorial narratives or design tools for public life and social settings. In this direction, he continues producing to excite, wonder, inform and inspire people and himself.
At the same time, they are self-reflective experiences that infiltrate the layers of the mind and mediate the reflection of concentrated and ready-to-overflow emotion thoughts on the paper plane.
They are projective processes triggered by random coincidences, and they tell us about us via us, that is, they form our usself-projections. In this context, the Usself-projection exhibition aims to explore the enigmatic world of the collage which is a creative act of turning the subconscious upside down from different perspectives.
The pandemic process, which we have slowly started to leave behind, has led to some awareness for all of us. During this time, we all had to stay in our homes. We were left alone with ourselves and in consequence, we returned to ourselves. We dived deep into our subconscious and confronted ourselves. The search moved into the house, and the house moved into us. The need for self-expression has become more dominant than ever before. This process reminded us once again of the importance of selfness issue. As Ursula K. Le Guin points out: “All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don't, our lives get made up for us by other people.”1. In daily life, various methods are used for the discovery and experience of the self. In order to reveal this potential, some write, some draw, some play, some sing, some listen, and some dance. In this context, collages which are the result of an uninterrupted flow from our minds to our hands, appear as a very effective meditative activity that triggers self-discovery. The collage technique, which started its adventure as a combination of various found visual materials that already exist and got together through some physical interventions, has succeeded in creating its own world with the help of its dynamic nature over time. This multi-layered ritual, which has its own preliminary processes such as collecting and accumulating, and the level of experience it offers, has made it inevitable to turn into a self-expression tool by exceeding the limits of its practical but equally effective technique.
Collages bring together the dispersed concepts floating in our minds and give them a clear meaning. In this way, they mediate the confrontation with ourselves. This confrontation can also be thought of as a momentary printout of the images that we have built-in our minds. The result obtained here does not correspond to a definite and fixed answer. Its lifespan is only as long as a reflection, but it is as clear as it is. At the same time, a collage's ability to make and break again and again supports its success in reflecting the fluidity of the self and the turbulent atmosphere of the mind. Considering our dynamic nature, these spontaneous self-reflections can be seen as steps of progress. On this wise, our deepest dreams, nightmares, anxieties, traumas, memories, emotions, and thoughts all turn into materials in our hands and take on the task of being our storytellers. These stories, which ostensibly sprout from individual issues are actually not far from being familiar to us, so we can easily associate ourselves. The strong bond that the collage can establish with its audience is perhaps the result of the empathy that it can easily construct. In this way, collage gains the quality of a collective thinking and production practice that touches everyone and is touched by everyone. Today, with the development of digital media and technologies, this technique is taking firm steps forward to become an effective communication model, perhaps more than ever before,
by diversifying and enriching without losing anything from its simple and powerful cut-and-paste logic. While doing this, it manages to preserve its mysterious aura and continues to make us question and think about it.
It may be wrong if we say that this is the only reality of collages, but they can be easily approached from such a direction. Even if we go one step further and stretch our limits of perception a little, it is possible to see the world, nature, cities, houses, us, and even our lives as elaborate collages. Based on all of these, the exhibition puts the audience in the middle of a paradoxical collage sequence that takes place in the collective mind of the curator and artists. By opening the conceptual issues of collage through some individual states such as being found, being at home, and being alone, it invites you to experience the collage in an exhibition setup positioned between reality and imagination and calls out:
Here is our home, here is our subconscious. Here, we are alone and crowded. Here, we are free and captive. Here, we are quiet and loud. Here, we are at the beginning and at the end. There are too many questions but no answers. Who are we? Who we are? We are who. We are just us.
“Because life is not an answer, it’s a question; only you can find the answer.”2
References
1. K., L. G. U. (1976). Very far away from anywhere else. Harcourt, Inc.
2. Ursula, L. G. (2004). The wave in the mind: talks and essays on the writer, the reader, and the imagination. Shambhala, Boston.