Curator: Hasan Bülent Kahraman
Artists: Ahmet Elhan, Şükran Moral, Ferhat Özgür, Seydi Murat Koç, Ardan Özmenoğlu, Murat Germen, Haluk Akakçe, Erdağ Aksel, Ansen, Ramazan Bayrakoğlu, Hussein Chalayan, Burak Delier, Ersan Deveci, Osman Dinç, Seçkin Pirim, Gülay Semercioğlu, Yaşam Şaşmazer, Serkan Taycan, Nazif Topçuoğlu, Vahit Tuna
Contemporary art was born in the last 20 years. The new art emerging through changes in institutional structures as well as in structural features was bearing various different characteristics. The exhibition curated by Hasan Bülent Kahraman envelops these differences with two fundamental concepts: autonomy and beauty.
Autonomy is one of the most striking qualities of new art. This was achieved through a comprehensive and compelling relationship that it established with the political and the social. Notions such as memory, identity, belonging, space and body altogether formed the backbone of the works of this period, but at the same time, these were creating the plane of intersection of the social and the political.
At the same time, the exhibition establishes the beautiful as another structural feature of the new art. Perhaps the most overlooked characteristic of new art in Turkey is highlighted through the works in this exhibition. The exhibition advocates that the aesthetic beauty becomes a specific “tool” for the constitution of the aesthetics of the surface, the volume, the space and of the body. Equally, it argues that the beautiful is adopted by artists as a founding principle and emphasises that the new art in Turkey is turned into a distinctive but at the same time a political resistance context.