In Carsick Sports Club, Ata involves the main elements of his painting in a new and mellow way. Having studied and done painting from a very early age on, Ata has come to stick to a series of elements that translated his imaginary onto canvas. Putting himself as 'a researcher that looks for things by the very act of painting,' Ata offered a significant quality of permanence in terms of the subjects of his interest, his approach and his narrational technique. Considering the ubiquitous commotion in the past decade, and the personal turmoils of growing up as an artist, Ata's attachment to his own painterly repertoire proves to be uniquely substantial.

During the past years that were defined by series of uncertainties, Ata managed to sustain his artistic existence within a certain personal pictorial language against and despite the inherent injustice of social institutions and the life itself. His consistency was enabled by two thematic anchors he has solidly hold on to: the records of his autobiographic transformations and the schools of painting in Early Renaissance. Ata points out the thematic framework of his paintings as such: 'We usually see figures that melt into spatial network, that are crushed by or pushed to the background by the heaviness of the space. This figure has an implication to auto-portraiture, yet it also points to the idea of an artist in general. Architectural components, or any element that serve to the feeling of the space represent the structural, the informational and the cultural. Various interpretations of the painting in Early Renaissance, that I have always referred back to whenever I looked for answers of any kind, have thus come to play the central role in my works.'

The way Ata organizes his thematic pictorial components and applies them to contemporary Istanbul, involves his paintings authentic. He positions himself at a permeable point in a particularly unpretentious manner and thus records and transmits the tides of his personal and the quotidian. On top of it, thanks to his kind treatment of Early Renaissance painting he carries in an eclectic humor and a subtle criticism, that would not be revealed in any other way than the implementation of Early Renaissance style that was developed before and outside of the 'academic' and 'monotonous' understanding of modern 'perspective.' The absurd quality in Ata's works, that were only to be expressed within a fully pictorial language, involves a genuine record for the rave and exuberance overall in 2000s. In Carsick Sports Club, the bildungsstory of a young intellectual defined by artistic enthusiasm is being told in a quintessential way within both a dark and colorful interpretation.

Curated by Charlie Roberts

Organized by 0-0 LA

Got It For Cheap is a traveling series of group shows organized by Charlie Roberts and Chris Rexroad. The goal of GIFC is to make buying original art accessible to all people and to give young artists a platform to sell their work and be exposed to a worldwide audience. 

Artists: Sena, Sabo, Huo Rf, Ecem Yuksel, Burak Ata

Curated by Zeynep Öz

K'AAD, KAAT, KAYIT, KAGIT

Signs of Time presents an installation made of handmade paper for the exhibition SPRING ( The Istanbul Off-site Project For Sharjah Biennial 13 ). The collective production and collaboration of the artists transforms into a collage made of paper. The conversations of the group of artists who got together regularly for two months turns into a surface. Used papers, newspapers, magazines, grain, seed, clay, pulse, water, glue, vegetables, plants, leaves, interventions on already produced papers and writings become a new production as the artists' materials. 

- Kagit means paper in Turkish and the title of the work has been inspired by its pronunciation in different dialects. 

Heroes, Bodies and Ruins was curated by Özkan Cangüven as a solo sub project of The Game Settled Into a Cagey Midfield Match curated by Zeynep Öz

Within the history of civilization, how will we remember and describe the era we are living in? Atomic age, oil age, space age, information age, social media age, Big Data age, all of these and more? The starting point of this project was an effort to understand and discuss this age in which all things transform rapidly in daily life, everything is pushed to their limits, and we are silenced in the face of plots conducted both micro and macro.

Umberto Eco, in his “Towards a New Middle Ages” says that nowadays, in a lot of circles, our age is talked about as the new Middle Ages, and opens up for discussion the dynamics of the pre-Renaissance Middle Ages in detail. This project takes on where Eco has left off, invites us to hope for a new ‘Renaissance’ and imagine the enlightenment and rebirth that follow dark times.

Burak Ata's artistic practice roots in Renaissance period, and through this he examines contemporary painting and art education, as well as pure and dark sides of playing games. In this exhibition, his new work "Heroes, Bodies and Ruins" and his recent works "Giotto's Angels" and "Salon des Refuses II" connects past, present and future.

Özkan Cangüven 

Artists: Bora Akıncıtürk, Turan Aksoy, Ferzan Aktaş, Burak Ata, Basako, Damla Baş, Zeynep Beler, Antonio Cosentino, Cemal Demir, Ali Elmacı, Tarık Gök, Şakir Gökçebağ, Horasan, Hüseyin Işık, Burak İşseven, Merve Morkoç, Ali İbrahim Öcal, İrfan Önürmen, Ferhat Özgür, Burcu Perçin, Sabo, Meltem Sarıkaya, Nejat Satı, Erinç Seymen, Tunca, Tolga Tüzün, Selahattin Yıldırım, Erdoğan Zümrütoğlu

“Dear audience; the pieces you’ll see in this exhibition are a fiction of the creator’s issue of building a world on his own. It’s a feeling of reproduction and existing. Each artist attends this exhibition with their own fiction and creation process, trying to make sure that this process is known and sensed, without any imposition, struggling to contour that state of existence in this world.”

Horasan

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The new exhibition that is going to be at Mixer’s new gallery, Sıraselviler Caddesi No:35 brings a diverse artist group from different disciplines. When one thinks about the act of ‘Masturbation’, the pleasure that artists are having during the creation process, it’s a reference in its own as an act, to the meaning of this word. It can also be seen as an act of converting a solo action to a collective situation. ‘Masturbation’ generally requests artists to work with different mediums than their usual medium; hence the exhibition is of a multidisciplinary experience. The show will include a wide range of artworks; varying from painting to video and performance. The exhibition aims to create a farceur encounter and some kind of a facedown moment. It also aims to sense one’s state of loneliness’ and dilemmas like safety and unsafety, tranquility and uneasiness simultaneously.

The Artist’s lonely existence during the creation process and isolation from the outer world-although not absolutely- is some kind of a rebellion moment. ‘Masturbation’ is looking for answers as if this reckoning can be converted to a rebellious act. It determines to exhibit this singularity on a plural platform with the help of the parallelism between the artist at the creation process and the act of masturbation.

Mixer

Artists: Tolga Tarhan, Burak Ata

Curated by Sevil Tunaboylu

Tasarım Bakkalı is hosting Burak Ata and Tolga Tahran's "If if Aches You're Alive" exhibition in February.
Burak and Tolga have painted in same school and same atelier. Wİth this exhibition the two friends are tracking for the refractions in their production process, from their past practices till today. "If it Aches You're Alive" can be seen from 2nd of February till 28th of February in Tasarım Bakkalı. 

Booth A1-105

Artists: Ecem Yüksel, Sena, Burak Ata, Huo RF, Sabo

Artists: Burak Ata, Fırat Engin, Nihat Kemankaşlı, Joana Kohen, Mehmet Kösemen, Murathan Özbek, Ardan Özmenoğlu, Seçkin Pirim, Tuğberk Selçuk

Curated by Senem Çağla Bilgin 

The curatorship which have not been able to create a professional network for its own as a field of profession and education in Turkey and have become simply a 'fashionable' in recent years, is described as 'The authorized person who organizes events and manages the Museum, Library, Exhibition etc in Turkish Language Society. This term, acquainted in the 1980s Turkey, started to progress through the projects, exhibitions, themes, sponsors in art platforms of different functions with the 90s but today it almost lost its function.

The ideas that are simulated by curators, give an edge to the subjective and directive sides of a person who suggests manufacturing method to the artists, completely distinguishes art works as a merchandise, is free of philosophical and sociological justifications. Consequently, we are facing with 'monsters' that lost its place between the artist and the crowd, describe content without criticism,  that are fed by historical facts which continuously exist, subject the facts to loss of function and importance. At this point, the ''Monster called Curator '' exhibition that reconstructs the relationship between the curator and artist rather than these descriptions, analyzes the perception of the artists about the curator, follows a path of enhancement in every field with an interdisciplinary approach that involves painting, sculpture, video art and performing arts and asks; Who is this monster called curator?

Senem Cagla Bilgin remarks about the exhibition that she curates; "While in the contemporary art of 2015 everything transforms into a consumption meta eluding its sense and function and making the identities 'fashionable' as evenly will cause these concepts a destruction in the long term. Herein, the term Curator that breaks into the contemporary art market of Turkey in the 1980s, turned into an forename in recent years and began to steal roles from the artists through a set of ideas that are dictated. Within this scope, the exhibition that I curate gives the other identities whose roles are stolen, notably the artists, their place back rather than questioning 'who the curator is' and tries to reconstitute and enhance this chain for the every related field. Therefore, the works that have been displayed shaped from a common perspective to periphery as the expression of an independent creation and succeeded this questioning in real terms."

Some of the work that will take place in the exhibition are as follows; Seckin Pirim creates an irony by fulfilling the order of the curator in her work that questions the interference of the curator in the artist and the work. Nihat Kemankaşlı, with his video art project, handles the relationship between the curator, artist and the audience. As for Tugberk Selcuk, with his Princess Stendhal performance, he experiences the toxic experiment that the postmodern art tendencies create by parodying the relationship of the art work and the audience in the eyes of both the audience and the artist. Selcuk in his performance, by making an updated criticism opposed to professionals who create this perception and the way of this relationship of the curator and the artist is perceived, opens the integrity of the creation process that depends on the experience and perception up for discussion suggesting that it cannot be disidentificated with the illusion of modernization. Fırat Engin, on the other hand, will take place in the exhibition with his neon work that he describes as the 'Eye of the Curator'. 

Photo: Zeynep Dilara
 

Artists: Burak Ata, Sabo, Burak Dak, Sena, Huo RF, Nihat Karataşlı 

Signs of Time artist collective are proud to announce their third exhibition, Cross the Earth, Her head is on the Balcony, at Pi Artworks Istanbul. The collective, which included Huo Rf, Sena, Sabo, Burak Ata, Burak Dak was founded to bring together young artists together who shared an admiration toward each other’s work. 

The exhibition’s title comes from a verse in French artist, poet and filmmaker Jean Cocteau’s poem Discourse For the Big Sleep. It focuses on the recent works of five artists from the group. Their different subjects and, stylistic approaches are brought together under the curatorial concept of; the reality, the actual and self-reckoning.

Cross the earth, her head is on the balcony also includes a project partnership with new media artist Nihat Karataşlı. Karataşlı will analyze the relation between the audience and the exhibited work with a new experimental method, which will be a visual installation showing this experimentation and collected data during the exhibition.

Booth LK801

Artists: Burak Dak, Sabo, Sena, Huo RF, Merve Morkoç, Burak Ata

Artists: Burak Ata, Sabo, Toygun Özdemir

Burak Ata, Sabo and Toygun Özdemir’s group show Parlor Party will be at Tankut Aykut between May 30th and June 28th, 2014. The opening will be on Thursday, May 29th, at 18:30.

Burak, Sabo and Toygun’s friendship started during their student years at Mimar Sinan University’s Painting Department, and has evolved into a series of collective works and presentations. Memory and transformation are common themes in their paintings, installations and video works to be featured in their first exhibition at Tankut Aykut.

In his series 36 Views of Gökova, Burak Ata reproduces the silhouette of Gökova using 36 different techniques and materials on canvasses of the same size. The series suggests a resistance to the vanishing memories of adolescence, an could be thought of as an exercise in remembering the fading images of youth using different techniques, combined with a pleasure derived from recreating memories through transforming them.

In his series B. File Detainees, Sabo documents cases of missing persons and violence in an unknown territory. In chronotophes that evoke a variety of fantasies, Sabo looks at faceless individuals who have become objects of violence and gives them identities in his portraits. The traces on his wall installation help us witness the past of a group of individuals.

Toygun Özdemir’s paintings and video works bring together images he has collected from his travels. His paintings are landscape abstractions in line with abstract expressionism, that aim to capture the resulting motion caused by rapid transit technologies by effectively freezing overlapping landscapes in a single frame and crystallizing travel memories.

Artists: Huo RF, Sena, Merve Morkoç, Burak Ata, Sabo, Burak Dak

Designed by Ozan Şanal

Artists: Huo RF, Sena, Merve Morkoç, Burak Ata, Sabo, Burak Dak 

An Artist needs only an artist to survive

It is not a coincidence ‘Signs of Time’ is standing by itself as an artist initiative with the support of only by artists. Realised its first exhibition at Galerist on 2013 July with the collaboration of artists HUO Rf, Merve Morkoç and Sena, the artist group’s existence in the contemporary art scene has an important aspect. Because today, this group shows us  it is possible to stand alone with the support only by themselves. On the other hand, Signs of Time also reveals that it is possible that an artist is capable of standing alone and creating. In signs of Time team, artists can curate and evaluate their shows, while they can also find galleries and venues to display their works. This is the total opposite attitude of an artist, who is attached to a gallery. With this attitude, the Signs of Time artists are supporting their own artistic development in freedom and this is the most important aspect of this group. Today, it is a vital need for contemporary art scene, to witness such a group, which consists of artists who are self-sufficient for their own creation. This approach gives artists freedom and this freedom also brings an environment that many Turkish artists are willing to live in. On the other hand, the group also gives us a brief point of view on the evaluation of artists’ works created in a free environment. As a result, Signs of Time proves us that an artist needs only an artist to survive and create.

At first, the project came to life when the three young artists, who are supported by Taner Ceylan, came together to create a common platform expressing their artistic beliefs and their anxieties. However, today it convinces that it is more than a project and let the artists to reach their goal, which is to declare their independence in light of the change that is taking hold of their generation and heralding a new era. The artist group shows us that it is not necessary to be attached to a gallery to display their works to public and by this, they open a new era to evaluate the free creation of art works.The new era of Signs of Time continues with a new exhibition and with new names, such as Burak Dak, Burak Ata and Sabo. 

Hatice Utkan

Artists: Sabo, Burak Ata, Burak Dak 

Curated by Fulya Çetin

The story of art production of hundreds of years is a concept that needs to be dealt with both as a source of inspiration and as a way of forming a unique language. The works by Sabo, Burak Ata and Burak Dak all three have just graduated from the Painting Department at Mimar Sinan carry the deep impact of this process in the works exhibited in their first exhibition. The three are forming their unique languages by addressing, specifically, this process. At this point, the collage technique and the repetition of elements that flow from one work to the other, carrying symbolism, weaves the productions of the three together.

Burak Ata has gone through a period in which he questioned the impact of Renaissance paintings that he encountered during his experience as an exchange student in Italy; he has gone through an intense period of production in which this impression was carried from the level of intuition to that of consciousness. Ata tackles once again Renaissance painter's approach to composition and the relationship between architecture and figure in paintings, focusing on the rested atmosphere of holidays, collaging forms, nature and figuration within specific, classical composition templates using his unique symbolism. He visualises the strange geometric, architectural and pastoral atmospheres that people under the burning sun, in holiday lethargy, assume, combining different styles in a unique blend at an extraordinary intersection.

Burak Dak's A4-size paintings on paper invite us to an atmosphere that is charged with symbols of paradise and hell descriptions of medieval paintings. At the center of his symbolic language that combines elements from our image world today to pop art to surrealism, is an incredibly meticulous and precise rendition of human bodies that also seem to be haphazardly divided into pieces. The act of breaking the body into pieces seem to contradict the meticulousness of the description of the body, recalling both the relationship that humans have formed with their own bodies as well as the violence directed towards the body and life. Burak Dak places the metaphors of the body that he has formed, inspired by a wide range of figures, including mythological half human half animal beings and popular figures, on the surreal decors, using the main axis of the exhibition the collage technique. The compositions that emerge enable us to discover different dimensions and elaborations of the story.

Sabo's exchange period in Italy was much more personal experience, in which he focused on people that he encountered in the flow of daily life. Sabo is inspired by the human states that can be as alienated, as awkward, in nature as they are in the city, focusing his collage technique this time on portraits. Faces, which are the most obviously personal element, become unrecognisable with exploding color and expressionistic interventions, visualising the energy that they internally carry, but repress in their relationships with the outside world and within webs of communication. The human figures, architecture and natural elements that he masterfully depicts in the realist tradition are carried onto a fantastic plane, centrally occupied by explosions of color and paint, while nature is abstracted, the expression is shifted from facial features to the abstraction of expressionistic stains. 

These three young artists determinedly deal with the phenomena that trigger, seduce and impact them in the processes of perception, intuition, fiction and de-construction, summed up in this attempt to produce a unique language from here. In their first exhibition at artSümer, the three close friends invite the viewers to a unique experience within this whole of symbols, stories and moments that they lay bare in this first exhibition, inviting us to be a part of this dialogue, carrying their silent conversations into the exhibition space.