Artists: Ahu Akgün, Cemil Toprak, Çağla Vera Kılıçarslan, Dilara Özüçelik, Egemen Tuncer, Engin Ümer, H. Esra Oskay-Malicki, Hazal Ünsal, Kadir Kayserilioğlu, Lara Lakay, Larissa Araz, Meltem Koçak, Merve Vural, Numan Erdinç, Osman Sadi Temizel, Özge Yalacak, Semiha Betül Yıldız, Semra Doğan Ak, SUPER NORMAL, Ufuk Aydın
Curator: T. Melih Görgün
Exhibition Design: Mert Karaçıkay
Akbank 37th Contemporary Artists Prize Exhibition is organized in collaboration with the Painting and Sculpture Museums Association and Akbank Sanat with the object of supporting developments in contemporary art and to support young artists. 20 artworks chosen by the evaluations of this year’s jury Prof. Dr. Aslı Serbest, Prof. Dr. Mona Mahall and Prof. T. Melih Görgün will be exhibited between 28 June – 31 July, 2019 in Akbank Sanat. The exhibition can be visited free of charge.
The theme of Akbank 37th Contemporary Artists Prize Exhibition is “A Spectacle of Collaborative Strategies".
The changes, transformations and spectacles in our everyday life practices, new situations arising from the merging of new words and new visions, also generate a collaborative domain for strategies of survival. Within the power and practice of re-forming the concepts of the ideology of consumption, contemporary art and culture will be a critical force and space for creative schemes for a better future.
As Alain Badiou wrote in his book “The Century” (Le Siècle),(*) this century would be the years of ruptures and antinomies. Every day we hear the news about or find ourselves directly in the midst of a situation, where masses of people are forced away from their homes, and their homelands. On the one hand, there are the plays of perception through the concepts of diversity, equality, difference that the future world uses for its own ideology of consumption, while on the other hand, there are the global powers advanced through mass displacements, and the individual that has become the object of consumption, and depleted. In this antagonism, we also obtain knowledge of a new means of observation and interpretation through media instruments.
What can we do in the face of the severity of this devastating situation? While we preserve our values in the context of eliminating the negative effects of unexpected moments that we are confronted with, how effective would our utterances be in these environments of contrived crises? Strategies, proposals, collaborations and words.
(*) Badiou, Alain “Le Siècle”, Editions du Seuil, 2005, “Yüzyıl”, transl. Işık Ergüden, Sel Yay.., İstanbul, 2011, ISBN : 9789755705385