Artists
Aslıhan Uruş, Ayşe Coşkun, Ayşe Gözde Çöklü, Ayşegül Yapar, Büşra Çeğil, Ece Kibaroğlu, Egemen Tuncer – Hacer Kıroğlu, Emin Berk, Hüseyin Demirbaş, İsmail Onur Gönüllü, Ömer Faruk Muslu, Özgün Şahin, Sarya Nurcan Kaya, Seda Kayatepe, Songül Berda Özdemir, Şafak Kocaoğlu, Şener Yılmaz Aslan, Şevval Konyalı, Şükrü Aslan, Ümran Hümayun
Jury Members
Agah Uğur, Leyla Alaton, Murat Tabanlıoğlu, Saruhan Doğan, Gönül Nuhoğlu, Derya Bigalı
Curator
Murat Tabanlıoğlu
Exhibition date: 21 September – 20 November 2021
Competition Theme:
Balcony?
In a speech at the Vienna Technical University in the 80s, addressing some five hundred aspiring architects and academics (including the author, who was studying at the institution in question at the time), Friedensreich Hundertwasser said;
“Our whole concern is that of humanising.”
It might not seem unusual in the world of our present day to hear that the Austrian painter, a passionate opposer of the rationalism of mid-twentieth century that approached the problem of housing as if it was a technical issue, was advocating the right for everyone to have the freedom to build their own homes, without the necessity of a degree, just the way it is in the arts of painting and sculpture. But the sub-themes that can be itemised through a reading of the said manifesto* would deserve an in-depth discussion.
During the past one and a half years, when the mobile nature of everyday life practices came to an unsettling pause, the homes we live in became one of the fundamental extensions of our existence as individuals. We started looking for solutions for having no balcony, not enough light, to our empty walls or overfilled display cabinets. Homes, the privacy of which has diminished with more screens and home-office set-ups, are no longer our safe havens. Today we are more aware than ever before, as we witness climate changes that have a lot to teach us. Conscious of the naivety of the desire to fix, to foresee, or make an effort to speculate about the future, art practices are also facing a standstill and at the same time extremely active.
Houses have an abundance of all forms of art, but during the days of the pandemic, as the relationship between the inside and the outside continues to gain new forms of expression and influence, where does the home stand with its liberating context in the universe of contemporary art? Balcony?
Murat Tabanlıoğlu
* “But we are building cubes, cubes! Where is our conscience?” A year after expressing these views in a text titled “My Eyes are Tired”, in 1958, Friedensreich Hundertwasser published his Mould Manifesto Against Rationalism in Architecture (Verschimmelungs-manifest gegen den Rationalismus in der Architektur).