Gökçe Özdem
Gökçe Özdem was born in Istanbul in 1988. She graduated from Marmara University, Department of Sociology. She served as the president of the Sociology Club which organized Marmara Sociology Days. Özdem holds a master's degree in Philosophy and Social Thought from Bilgi University. Her master thesis is 'What Menon Sees: On the New Role of Theory in Art'. She is currently a PhD student in Art Theory at the Institute of Social Sciences in Işık University. Her research interests center around aesthetic experience in contemporary art. Her articles on literature, cinema and architecture appeared in various publications including Hürriyet Gösteri. A number of her articles were included in the compilations Architecture in Literature, Architecture in Cinema, Architecture in Contemporary Turkish Literature, published by Yapı Endüstri Merkezi.
Recall
The Recall project’s core theme is based on Nietzsche’s notion of eternal return, the idea that all existence has been eternally recurring.
In this cyclical time, the present holds the past and the future within.
History revolves around those we recall. When the era decelerates and suddenly slows down, our memories attempt to cope with the chaos we experience and to make sense of it. This unexpected slowdown activates both our individual and collective memories. Evaluating this pandemic historically together with our previous experiences and activating our collective memories developed a method that allowed us to cope with the chaos we are experiencing today. That is why the media recalled the plague epidemic from history and presented the news of earlier food queues familiar from the times of war. Of course, our personal memories do not remain idle either… Those recalled also contain the potency of saying yes to living life again.
While the exhibition project focuses on what we recalled from the collective and individual memory during the pandemic we have been experiencing, it also aims to establish a viewpoint and a space of interaction about the functioning of memory and the cyclical nature of time. In this context, the exhibition is planned to be an exhibition of documentation, consisting of the artists documenting what they have recalled from their individual and social memories (such as an object, a photograph, a document, a book, or a sound) during the pandemic, within the framework of their own wishes or artistic practices.