Curators: Ali Akay, Levent Çalıkoğlu
Artists: Seza Paker, Nasan Tur, Banu Cennetoğlu
Ecstasy is an action–an act–that brings together a transcendental relationship consisting of images that are visible or invisible when looking at nature, human beings, plants, and animals; of things that are internalized and externalized; and of audible and inaudible sounds and movements. Ecstasy reveals itself and makes itself felt at the moment that a relationship is felt and understood when confronted by the articulated elements of a work of art. In the history of art, this has always been concerned with things that are agreeable, beautiful, and/or sublime. Inasmuch as that which is sublime emerges in the relationship between comprehension/incomprehension and
pleasantness/unpleasantness, it is related to an absolutism in which the figural in art has vanished: It is that which is supreme.
States of ecstasy operate outside specific experiences. Quite the contrary, they consist of inner experiments on the path of an “ignorance” that transcends knowledge and drives a person towards ecstasy by drawing him to a condition of feeling that is extra-momentary. For artists, states of ecstasy that transport them outside of systematic thought correspond to the moment when they eschew clichés and venture into creativity. This results in a state of “transcendental ecstasy”.
In our lives today, experiments with every sort of nomadicism, the deliberations of artistic and symbolic experiments, and religious rituals all manifest themselves in successive stages of the states of ecstasy.