The international exhibition entitled “KÖK.01″, which will be mainly attended by artists from Turkey, is a gathering of artistic productions using various art disciplines and techniques. This exhibition, hosted by the Abusuan gallery in Bari, Italy, aims to build a dialogue between cultures through art by bringing artists from different countries together.
Through the formation of ” KÖK.01 ” where many artists come together, the openness to new beginnings and primitives of artists who are fed from their roots-culture can also be observed at the same time with ’01’ . The common language of the works that make up this exhibition; It is the bond established by the concept of “self” that forms the whole of the past, present and future.
The exhibition will include artistic productions that will bring the different social environments of artists together who continue their artistic life in different cultures and the thoughts and behaviors guided by geography, and the way they perceive themselves and their environment. The only common element that will bring the artists together in this exhibition is “art”. The exhibition, which will be brought together with spectator in this common ground, will reveal the differences, similarities and different cultures shaped by the “self” perception through art.
Organized by
Fatmagül Mutlu
Kardelen Kılınç
Perhaps since the person began to describe himself as “I”, the question always followed: Who am I? He often defined his identity with a belonging.
The identity cards we have to carry, for instance, say we are citizens of a state, but belongings do not end with that. A person wants to belong to a family, a dynasty, a national, an upper economic class, a racial, a religion, a sect, an ideology, a soccer team, or whichever college graduate society, and cannot help defining himself with the things apart from himself.
If you were a tree, flower it would be easy, you would know that you belonged to the place where your roots reach, and you would not know it would be like that by itself. But the curse of being a man is : Nothing is so spontaneous. Everything is spilled into the words first, the thing that spills into words becomes separate from us ,then transforms into an entity standing against us and we start asking questions to it, and we are getting away from what we are asking questions to; as we keep asking “Who am I?” ,for instance, we keep finding ourselves and lose again.
The challenging question on the basis of all the intellectual activities of man led to the formation of all our cultural accumulation: philosophy arose, religion arose, history arose, medicine arose, mythology arose, archeology arose, science arose, art arose. Some philosophers said that we all carry the same human essence inside us, some said that we create ourselves from scratch here.
Unless the answer was able to be found or unless being content with the answers found , the activities varied, and the corpus fed from here grew bigger and bigger, lives weren’t enough.
They say “art is long, life is short “, but the word of art here includes all the activities that we have or haven’t mentioned above. In the past, both medicine and carpentry were compiled art. Then the expertise deepened and separated from art. When last the aesthetic was left to fields such as advertising, fashion, decoration, the questions of “what was left to art, what is art, is this art, is this also art?”have been asked but the answers cannot be found any way .
If the human belongs to something in any case, it belongs to the land where s/he was born and / or where s/he passed the childhood, its geography is his/her fate.* People who leave that land sometimes struggle with longing like fish taken out of deep seas, literature and cinema are full with stories of it..It will be filled more, the stories of the present day will be written: people who have to migrate from the place where they were born because of the war, and others who do not accept them to their land, the others who are wall hangers and trippers.
It is very controversial what exactly art is, but it is the fact that it allows communication between people of different lands. In the exhibition Root 01, a group of artists from Turkey move their works to the Bari city of Italy, to share the stories of all human beings under the same sky. At present, against the language increasingly rushing up discrimination and getting rough , we need the kind language of art to overcome all the boundaries and walls between us
Even if we do not speak, the art productions of different cultures always talk to each other, and this has happened like this throughout history. The songs that people sing who are even unaware of each other, the motifs they work are in touch, they have partnerships from similar human experiences.
It is not possible for us to be unaware of each other in this age of intense communication, in so much that living the danger of coincidence even in the shrinking world when differences are being emphasized so much is also ironic.
To be able to notice how much we can share in the differences underlined, we wish the occasion to multiply “The Root 01” exhibition
* “Geography is fate.” İbn-i Haldun
Eşref Yıldırım
Artist
