Don’t Look Back, Deep is the Past

10 December 2021 – 31 July 2022
Pi Artworks Istanbul, Turkey

“Don’t Look Back, Deep is the Past” focuses on the roles and identities assigned to individuals in context of their relationship with society, habits based on social norms and the ways in which we define the Other.

Informed by perspectives and forms of expression that the individual often conceals (and occasionally articulates) in their journey as part of collective memory; the exhibition looks into concepts like “taboo” and “freedom” from the standpoint of social order and its rituals.

Works that explore feelings of belonging, conformity, rejection and defiance, the unavoidable vulnerabilities reserved to being human reveal the systematic relationship between the part and the whole as well as individual and society. While the exhibition examines the eternal and deeply rooted conflict between the individual and society arising from polarized, contradictory points of view, the artworks find a commonality in the traditional techniques and images they are imbued with.

Providing opportunities to discover new connections between individual and collective, the exhibition gives viewers new ideas about pre- assigned roles, prescribed constraints and the possibility of alternative lives while also inviting them to reconsider their idiosyncratic placements and positions in a new light.

FROM HERE
I AM NOT FROM HERE,
I LIVE HERE.
HE IS NOT FROM HERE,
HE LIVES HERE.
SHE IS NOT FROM HERE,
SHE LIVES HERE
THEY ARE NOT FROM HERE,
THEY LIVE HERE.
THE OTHERS ARE NOT FROM HERE, THEY LIVE HERE.
EVEN THOSE FROM HERE ARE NOT REALLY FROM HERE!

Everyone in Istanbul, even those who are born there, are strangers. Urban spaces are in a state of flux and change with inhabitants continually moving from here to there.

From Here
2000 – 2021
Digital print on stairs