Ertuğrul Akyüz - Eden Blur

ERTUĞRUL AKYÜZ

EDEN BLUR

January 20 – February 28, 2022

“The perspective stretching away towards the artificial horizon before our eyes encapsulates plants resembling octopuses with their entwined branches and leaves, every so often a car, a road sign, a building, or a part of it, of which we never are conscious of how far the rest goes. These are places that remind everywhere but at the same time resemble nowhere. Scenes of uncertainty that once repressed, disidentified, rasped, mutilated, surrendering its soul to someone else for the so-called "greater good" of society.” -Sinan Eren Erk

Akyüz analyzes the relationship between humans and nature through his observations of the Chernobyl region which is in the process of recovery and regeneration. The exhibition displays the ‘deconstruction’ of the district abandoned after the disaster.

In the catalog, curator Sinan Eren Erk summarizes the exhibition as “Ertuğrul Akyüz redefines the problematic relationship between humans and nature, based on one of the greatest disasters in history, in this exhibition that entitled "Eden Blur". He searches for the limits of man's will to power, obsession with possession and self-destructive recklessness, and consequences in the traces of a tragedy right under our noses, which he himself visited years later. With the series, the artist expresses the fragility of the great promises that people prioritize with enthusiasm and greed, confronting the calm, unhurried and impartial wisdom of nature.”

Ertuğrul Akyüz’s exhibition, Eden Blur, can be visited at Piramid Sanat until February 28th, 2022

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Archive of a Non-overlapping Repetition: Eden Blur

Sinan Eren Erk

"There will come a day when they will find very strange graves. Animal cemeteries, which scientists refer to as bio-cemeteries. These are the temples of the modern age. Thousands of hit cats, dogs, and horses lie in them. Not even one of them happens to have a name."[i]

The perspective stretching away towards the artificial horizon before our eyes encapsulates plants resembling octopuses with their entwined branches and leaves, every so often a car, a road sign, a building, or a part of it, of which we never are conscious of how far the rest goes. These are places that remind everywhere but at the same time resemble nowhere. Scenes of uncertainty that once repressed, disidentified, rasped, mutilated, surrendering its soul to someone else for the so-called "greater good" of society. The suffocating coverage of ideologies, leaked into the soil by radioactive rains, left trees and grass behind as maturity lines and wrinkles. The deafening political rhetoric of the time, the theatrical oaths made for supreme ideals among the rhythmic footsteps, the ignorance, and the damp shadows of egos that abuse science, which does not bow down for any master, have long left this place.

Quiet, humanless, purified, at last.

Still non-overlapping.

In this distant and intrinsically near universe, time no longer moves with the tickings of the clock, but only with the accelerating and decelerating clicks of the Geiger counter.[ii] And nature, reclaiming what belongs to it, while embracing and growing what is left behind after the great disaster, just like what oyster does to the grain of sand. On the one hand, everything seems to be getting smoother and more bearable, perhaps even giving people a new chance. However, on the other hand, it also shines a great arrogance and stupidity like a pearl and ensures that it will never be forgotten. Everything in this misty image, which we try to clarify by squinting, is ground up in the meat grinder of our comfort zones, turning into a sickening slurp mixed with guilt in our minds.

Which way I flie is Hell;

my self am Hell[iii]

It was too late for everything when the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant's reactor number four, whose temperature was nearly half of the Sun's surface, went out of control on April 26, 1986. Its faulty design had an impact on the meltdown of the Soviet-made RBMK type reactor, which is still used today, but such a disaster was only possible with the combination of many incidents caused by human error. The chain reaction, which had been destabilized as a result of great carelessness, turned into an explosion of steam and hydrogen in the blink of an eye. It caused a fire, followed by the meltdown of the reactor. The scattering of radiation spread across the world like a deadly breath. The rest is history.

Ertuğrul Akyüz redefines the problematic relationship between humans and nature, based on one of the greatest disasters in history, in this exhibition that entitled "Eden Blur". He searches for the limits of man's will to power, obsession with possession and self-destructive recklessness, and consequences in the traces of a tragedy right under our noses, which he himself visited years later. With the series, the artist expresses the fragility of the great promises that people prioritize with enthusiasm and greed, confronting the calm, unhurried and impartial wisdom of nature.

The demolition of constructed paradises, the fading voice of reason, the chains that we harden in order to be free, the control mechanisms that we carry as a hunch wherever we go; he sarcastically projects our prisons, our reformatories, our asylums, and our watchtowers, things we are ashamed enough of to neglect while trying to forget.

Akyüz lays out the blurriness of our vision, all the definitions that cannot be clarified, misfortunes, glitches, and absurdities; He brings them together in vivid but artificial colors that he uses consciously, and in sharp but often not overlapping lines. Thus, “Eden Blur” turns into a repetition archive, which Akyüz records patiently and within his own astonishment.

For more information:

Gülfem Naz Yılmaz

m. +90 (530) 0729187

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