Sasha Pirogova – Kerem Ozan Bayraktar
17 – 30/10/2020
MONITOR, İzmir, Turkey
Supported by Spaces of Culture, Monitor brings together Sasha Pirogova and Kerem Ozan Bayraktar in the exhibition entitled “I haven’t told my garden yet.” Created on the basis of the origin of life, the exhibition focuses on its structure that continues to exist in different forms.
Assuming that everything is a remnant of the previous one, what is left behind each one merges with the other and turns into something else. Although that is no longer here in its previous form, it constitutes the building blocks of the other. It is still here; breathing, becoming breathe and being released back to the world. When Karl Raimund Popper talks about organisms that transform into each other in an effort to turn their environment into a better place, he refers to the three states of the cell consisting of death, fragmentation and fusion. According to the author, the main cell that constitutes all the other cells still exists, thanks to its journey between forms, and has transformed the earth into a garden.* The light, which is the first thing that appeared in the big bang starting the story, rose from within the darkness. According to Popper, the most important feature of organisms “is that they fill the atmosphere with oxygen and have found out that sunlight can be used as food.”** The light was followed by the world of plants and animals. In her video titled “Garden”, Sasha Pirogova deals with the life and death through the concepts of dark and light. In the artist’s work, darkness is grasped as a lack of light not the opposites of the light as habitually perceived. According to Pirogova, the human being is a source of light. If there is human, there is hope for the light appears. In this way, the human being creates the garden in which flowers continue to bloom eternally. “Garden” is a story that refers to the life which triumphs.
The emergence of oxygen, which caused the death of many life forms, brought human beings to the world, along with its current inhabitants. When the world was about half of its present age, photosynthesis by cyanobacteria enabled oxygen to spread into the atmosphere and the development of multicellular organisms. Kerem Ozan Bayraktar, in his work “Respiration”, conveys the relationship he established between life and death with a section he presented after the Great Oxidation Event. Death, which is seen as the final stop of all living beings, does not fulfill the last task regarding extinction from the earth and constitutes the steps of the movement. The ambulances in the artist’s work, which are associated with the moments when life is at risk, need energy to move like everything else. The living organisms of time transform over the years and get into circulation of the earth in different states of matter. The original cell that makes up all other cells continues to disintegrate and come together in the infinite form it takes on.
“I haven’t told my garden yet” tries to remind the two-way continuity of flow, inspired by the silent motion of plants, in our time when thinking on extinction has universally increased.
* Karl Raimund Popper, In Search of a Better World – Daha İyi Bir Dünya Arayışı, Translated by İlknur Aka, YKY, Cogito, p. 26, 2019
** Ibid., p. 28
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