Insight into the new exhibition at Spike Island gallery, Bristol:
Programme for this autumn:
I was very touched by Imran's film and Meriç's art work.
They both address the lack of understanding and empathy we all suffer from in the post-modern world, especially inside multicultural communities, often misunderstood, misrepresented, and disenfranchised on many levels.
Imran's film is built around a powerful text, inspired by his experience in a Bangladeshi family/neighbourhood in London. The visuals, presented on two screens creating a sort of dialogue between the images and the sound, are showing a series of Asian men isolated in different rooms of an empty school, being invaded by water while they speak to us...
Their words are literally transporting us beyond their body and situation, into their stuggling mind...
Imran Perretta
the destructors
'the destructors' is a solo exhibition and major new film commission by London-based artist Imran Perretta. Drawing on the artist’s own experience as a young man of Bangladeshi heritage, the film explores personal and collective experiences of marginalisation and oppression. Shot on location in Tower Hamlets, East London, it reconsiders the figure of alienated male youth, exploring the complexities of ‘coming of age’ for young Muslim men living in the UK.
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Meriç Algün
Day Craving Night
As for Meriç Algün's exhibition, the Turkish artist now based in Stockholm, Sweden, encapsulates visual representations of isolation, separation and alienation in human relationships, in our world becoming a little harsher every day.
Through an installation based on shelves, she has selected imaginary books going by telling titles such as 'Half/Other Half', 'Distance', 'Bitterweet Wound' and of course 'Day Craving Night'.
Another central piece is a old European map, figuring the world before the continents drifted and after... Titled, in French, 'Avant la Séparation' and 'Après la Séparation' (ie. Before and after the separation...).
The other pieces are inspired by maritime travels, echoing the history of the trans-Atlantic exploration launched from the 1400s.
Another central piece is a old European map, figuring the world before the continents drifted and after... Titled, in French, 'Avant la Séparation' and 'Après la Séparation' (ie. Before and after the separation...).
The other pieces are inspired by maritime travels, echoing the history of the trans-Atlantic exploration launched from the 1400s.
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The gallery wrote:
For her solo exhibition at Spike Island, Stockholm-based artist Meriç Algün presents a series of new and recent works that explore the precarious nature of love in a world obsessed with individualism, consumption and borders. Bringing together a wide range of resources from the Carboniferous period to today, the exhibition takes the form of a spatial collage that draws analogies between love, nature and culture.
Working with a variety of media, from video and text to installation, Algün often works in context-specific ways and according to set parameters, using ordering systems to suggest that meaning is never as fixed as we might think. Bureaucratic language features prominently in early works such as The Concise Book of Visa Application Forms (2009), for example, in which the artist bound all the visa application forms in the world, rendering them unintelligible while illustrating the lengthy processes that different citizens have to go through before they are permitted to travel. Facing such questions as ‘Are you and your partner living in a genuine and stable relationship?’ Algün asks how these normative systems and restrictions are influencing what is possible for us to say and do.
Meriç also wanted to curate these very famous commercials from the 1990s - for the Calvin Klein's fragrance 'Eternity' - to underline the dominant pattern of representation of the Europo-centric ideal of domestic bliss and love... Misrepresenting so many of the other inhabitants of the megalopolises of our Western world. An ideal for most impossible to achieve in a daily life filled with alienation, stress, isolation, distance, misunderstanding and ego battles... But the myth sells well.
One of the inspirations for this exhibition was a book, 'Eros The Bittersweet', about the Greek god of Love...:
“Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counterglance, between ‘I love you’ and ‘I love you too,’ the absent presence of desire comes alive.”– ANNE CARSON’S, EROS THE BITTERSWEET (1983)
MERIÇ ALGÜN
Meriç Algün (b. 1983, Istanbul) is an artist based in Stockholm. She studied at the Sabanci University, Istanbul, and later at the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm. Algün has held many solo exhibitions in Europe and has participated in numerous international biennials such as SALTWATER: A Theory of Thought Forms, 14th Istanbul Biennial (2015); Between the Pessimism of the Intellect and the Optimism of the Will, 5th Thessaloniki Biennial (2015); All the World’s Futures, 56th Venice Biennale (2015); Leaving to Return, 12th Bienal de Cuenca, Ecuador (2014); You Imagine What You Desire, 19th Sydney Biennial (2014).
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Spike Island
133 Cumberland Road
Bristol BS1 6UX
United Kingdom
133 Cumberland Road
Bristol BS1 6UX
United Kingdom
Bristol, city of art!
More soon.
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