What is your purpose? All over the world, young go-getters gather en masse to ask themselves the same question. The aching sense that, in spite of relative academic or professional achievement, there is something lacking draws them ever closer to the warm light of pseudo-spiritualism, health club transcendence - or sometimes just a coke habit.
Bora Akinciturk (b.1982 Ankara, TR) ascends from the digital mire, dragging with him the detritus of popular culture. His work is thick, meta-metaphors binding to one another - gelatinous offal from the hive mind. To speak on the relationship between high and low culture is old-hat, parochial. There is no hierarchy in the stream of content - a gunshot is a twerk video is a meme. The internet is a sticky place, it’s easy to be dazzled by the bright lights of the information super-strip but to understand, interpret and reposition the endless barrage is an entirely different question.
There’s a sense of presence unique to infinite oncoming traffic, like standing on the centre line of a road with cars passing on either side, having missed the chance to move. Everything blurs together, there’s no differentiation, no value, no structure. Interpretation becomes moot because the content stream will rush regardless, we become adept at fractional analysis, understanding imagery at face value - an assessment coming from the inside, only subjectivity.
Akinciturk’s work presents opportunities for the educated and the uninitiated, it's a neutral ground for interpretation but one which retains an awareness that all battles fought are lost - caught in zugzwang. There is no search for objective truth because the possibility of objective truth has been derailed, replaced by vehement partisanship. We pile on the symbols that best reflect our sense of self, intent on reaching an audience, perpetual content for the void.
Through these attempts at self-representation, we are diluted, the search pushing us further from a point of contentment. Eventually, cycle after cycle, the possibility of contentment is replaced by a doppelganger, an empty representation of a representation - a perpetual false promise.
To work within this structure, Akinciturk addresses futility through his painting. Space plays a pivotal role in the works, re-contextualising images and objects within alternative structures in order to further obfuscate interpretation.
GROUP EGO DEATH YOGA AND MEDITATION is an exhibition of new paintings focused around these notions of representation, the supplanting of oneself with a newer, more extreme self - one built of complete aesthetics, managed, structured and disseminated.
Bora Akinciturk (b.1982 Ankara, TR) ascends from the digital mire, dragging with him the detritus of popular culture. His work is thick, meta-metaphors binding to one another - gelatinous offal from the hive mind. To speak on the relationship between high and low culture is old-hat, parochial. There is no hierarchy in the stream of content - a gunshot is a twerk video is a meme. The internet is a sticky place, it’s easy to be dazzled by the bright lights of the information super-strip but to understand, interpret and reposition the endless barrage is an entirely different question.
There’s a sense of presence unique to infinite oncoming traffic, like standing on the centre line of a road with cars passing on either side, having missed the chance to move. Everything blurs together, there’s no differentiation, no value, no structure. Interpretation becomes moot because the content stream will rush regardless, we become adept at fractional analysis, understanding imagery at face value - an assessment coming from the inside, only subjectivity.
Akinciturk’s work presents opportunities for the educated and the uninitiated, it's a neutral ground for interpretation but one which retains an awareness that all battles fought are lost - caught in zugzwang. There is no search for objective truth because the possibility of objective truth has been derailed, replaced by vehement partisanship. We pile on the symbols that best reflect our sense of self, intent on reaching an audience, perpetual content for the void.
Through these attempts at self-representation, we are diluted, the search pushing us further from a point of contentment. Eventually, cycle after cycle, the possibility of contentment is replaced by a doppelganger, an empty representation of a representation - a perpetual false promise.
To work within this structure, Akinciturk addresses futility through his painting. Space plays a pivotal role in the works, re-contextualising images and objects within alternative structures in order to further obfuscate interpretation.
GROUP EGO DEATH YOGA AND MEDITATION is an exhibition of new paintings focused around these notions of representation, the supplanting of oneself with a newer, more extreme self - one built of complete aesthetics, managed, structured and disseminated.