Volkan Aslan: Shoot Me! Don't Turn Me Over!
Pi Artworks Istanbul is pleased to present Volkan Aslan's solo exhibition Shoot Me! Don't Turn Me Over! curated by Merve Elveren between 7 April - 5 May 2018 at our new space in Karaköy.
Featuring three new works by Volkan Aslan, Shoot Me! Don't Turn Me Over! builds on signs of disintegration resulting from social and personal conflicts. Despite the exhibition's poignant title, through a dialogue and relation between the works, Aslan seeks ways of healing and renewal.
Produced for the exhibition publication of "Don't Forget to Remember" (Arter, Istanbul, 2013) and consisting of multiple prints of a stamp across a single surface, A memory of some things (2018) immediately confronts visitors as they enter. While the uniformity of the cloud images standardizes the ruptures and traumas intended to be memorialized, the repetitive rhythm hints to the abundance of these moments. In A memory of some things (2018), the production becomes a healing and restorative process as each image is surrounded, consequently monumentalized, by the heavy layers of watercolor. The video Ölüye ağlayamayan insanların huzursuzluğu içindeyim [I am troubled like the people who cannot weep for the dead] (2018) takes its name from a chapter of Sait Faik Abasıyanık's story "Izmir'e". Suggesting a continuous state of restlessness, the video shows a single rose repeatedly washed by an anonymous hand. As in the ritual of narrating dreams to running water present throughout the Near East, the story internalizes an expectation for the unsettling omens to be washed away with the flow.
A wall carpet, featuring a deer with arrows, interrupts the exhibition's abstract relationship with the future. While capturing a violent scene, Shoot Me! Don't Turn Me Over! (2018) makes visible the state of intolerance that provokes the power struggle between man and nature. Shoot Me! Don't Turn Me Over! (2018) does not provide a way out, rather embodies the subtle tension between the moments of disintegration and entrapment.
Volkan Aslan (1982), lives and works in Istanbul. He is the co-founder of 5533, a non-profit independent art space in Istanbul. Recent exhibitions include: Adventitious Encounters (Open Space Contemporary, London, 2018), Home is where the (he)art is (Galerie Paris-Beijing, Paris, 2018), A Good Neighbour, (15th Istanbul Biennial, 2017), Harbor (Istanbul Modern, 2017), Istanbul. Passion, Joy, Fury (MAXXI, Rome, 2016), The Perfect Day (solo), (Pi Artworks Istanbul, 2015), Mom, am I a barbarian? (13th Istanbul Biennial, 2013), Don't Forget to Remember, (solo), (ARTER, Istanbul, 2013).
