Kerem Evcil
Born in Istanbul, Kerem Evcil studied Computer Programming and Philosophy. He was selected for the Akbank Sanat Contemporary Art and Curatorship Program, from which he graduated successfully with his project Aesthetic Anesthesia. In addition to his formal education, he participated in numerous courses and workshops in drawing, photography, and cinema, obtaining certifications and later offering his own trainings.
In 2023, he served as a consultant and curator for the project Aşık Veysel: Yalan Dünya Yarsız Olmaz under the leadership of İFSAK. This project gained attention by philosophically examining the concepts of Episteme, Doxa, and Eros through the lens of Aşık Veysel’s lyrics and his powerful descriptions despite his blindness. The project sparked discussions about the reality of photographic images and representation in visual arts. It was exhibited at the ART CONTACT ISTANBUL INTERNATIONAL CONTEMPORARY ART FAIR and İBB Müze Gazhane, representing İFSAK. Currently, he continues his work as a consultant and preparatory contributor for his second exhibition project, Apollo and Dionysus.
Throughout his life, Kerem Evcil has drawn, written stories and scripts, taken photographs, directed documentaries and short films, but most of all, he has thought. He has thought through images, about images, and about thinking with images. His intellectual explorations include ideas like “perspective,” “reverse perspective,” “punctum,” “time-image,” and the philosophical relationship between Florence and Baghdad. He has traveled, observed, and tracked traces. His passion for photography led him to collect photography books from masters such as Brassaï, Diane Arbus, Nobuyoshi Araki, Josef Koudelka, Martin Parr, and Robert Doisneau. He also amassed a collection of graphic novels alongside his photography books.
Kerem Evcil continues to learn, create, think, imagine, and explore along this path of intellectual and artistic pursuit.
Aesthetic Anesthesia
“The way in which perceived things are given always contains unperceivable horizons, and every presence in this sense contains a ground of non-existence.”
In today's world, we are exposed to a constant visual and sensory bombardment. Every day we are confronted with countless images, sounds and information. This intensity can overwhelm our sensory perception, blinding us, numbing us emotionally and mentally. In the process, we are able to recognise relations of representation weaken and our perception of reality becomes increasingly blurred. At this point, the concept of Aesthetic Anaesthesia comes into play.
Aesthetic anaesthesia, which sounds like a medical concept as soon as it is heard, is a hermeneutic concept when subjected to deconstruction, into its components as ‘aesthetics’ and ‘anaesthesia’ deep with the philosophical, etymological and everyday meanings that we encounter when separated the layered semantic structure of aesthetic anaesthesia is a pair of concepts that can mean to place these concepts in a deeper context and to trace these concepts from the history of art, philosophy to the history of anaesthesia.
Aesthetic anaesthesia is aesthetically and artistically combined with the pain-relieving and dream-inducing aspects of anaesthesia, or the healing power of art, as well as aesthetics and the dynamic of life and death that exists in the etymological roots of anaesthesia, the ancient sensible and also includes the distinction of the thought.
Aesthetic Anaesthesia, heard and seen, accompanied by the works included how the non-existent, the imaginary and anaesthetic becomes visible and visible through aestheticisation (aisthesis) can become audible, and at the same time, the aesthetics seen and heard (an-aisthesis) becomes abstract and perceptible through intuition and imagination. The dialectic formed through representations that open the door to intuition and the dialectic formed by this dialectic how feeling is expressed in language, in different mediums of art and in all areas of life to reveal what is being experienced.
Aesthetic anaesthesia, in the speed of modern life, aims to revitalise our senses, our perceptions It aims to sharpen and take us beyond the usual norms. The etymology of Aisthesis is based on the words and like the words each medium has its own language, existence-absence, light-darkness, definiteness-definiteness their existence in the dynamics and dialectics of opposites such as uncertainty, visibility and invisibility tries to express it. To create a pause, a breathing space against the regular and generally accepted in realising all these goals, instead of rejecting what is customary altogether, it should be these contrasts exist side by side in an aesthetic anaesthesia, embracing their opposites completes and forms a new unity.
Through the selected works, this layered, dialectical structure of the aesthetic and anaesthetic are laid out in the company of different disciplines and mediums. Aesthetics in the same space to imagine and think together the various forms and contradictions of anaesthesia are brought together. In this context, the exhibition is an exhibition that goes beyond norms and stereotypes, which are often ignored. It also aims to explore the aesthetic potential of elements that are characterised as ugly. How the ordinary, the marginalised, the invisible has an aesthetic value the boundaries between the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic with this discovery blurs them, brings them together.
Aesthetic anaesthesia also opens doors to thought and imagination. Classical logic instead of the either-or dichotomy, he adopts the idea of both/and. Differences between establishes a bond, does not force us to make a choice, but rather brings together elements that are not united. presents. This combination transforms the exhibition space into a kind of intellectual challenge; it invites them to go beyond the ordinary, to rediscover their senses.
Here, aesthetics and non-aesthetics, life and death, perspective and reverse perspective, West and The East, Apollo and Dionysus, being and non-being all coexist. All at the same time, exists in the same space. Now, here and now and together*.
This exhibition not only presents works of art, but also the intellectual universe surrounding them to the exhibition. Thus, Sartre's Pier is one of the permanent visitors of the exhibition...