Burçak Bingöl's The Land of Oblivion I - II (2024) is on view at the Barın Han, as part of the group exhibition "Critical Shifts".
Everything shifts, everything is being shifted. Alongside larger geosocial and geopolitical migration of peoples and matter come daily shifts that remain unnoticed, yet often become agents of critical transformations, openness and new beginnings.
By following these smaller movements of matter, form and meaning, the exhibition showcases works of contemporary artists who embrace such shifts — whether through a material, metaphorical or invisible form — as a method of their diverse practices and consider them integral to any knowledge production.
Fish are being caught in Spanish waters; women move silently through a deserted landscape in Uzbekistan; a word from a nineteenth century poem is inserted into a Google Ad and becomes a commodity; a water fountain outside a mosque in Istanbul turns into a drinking point for pigeons… To shift is to remove something from the usual or proper place, and Critical Shifts are interested in the ways this simple action functions in the contemporary paradigm where there is no proper place and no usual. The prefixes de-, dis,- un–, re-, ex- become too familiar in the vocabulary of our common condition, as well as the processes they denote — replacing, mistaking, displacing, extracting, dissolving, dislocating.
The artists in Critical Shifts try to look at these actions not as disturbing or destabilising, but as a productive, positive, and generative force. These shifts are necessary for creating space and possibilities for re-making, re-assembling, re-building and re-emerging into new shapes — first unstable but gradually solid and powerful. Shifting is then considered a condition of being — and by extension — of becoming.
The Land of Oblivion I - II (2024)
Installation; glazed bricks, ceramics, MDF pedestal
90 x 60 x 50 cm (with pedestal), 160 x 130 x 130 cm (with pedestal)
Text and image courtesy of the Barın Han.
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