Artist Ferhat Özgür's Universe Showcased At Operation Room

Turkish contemporary artist Ferhat Özgür is the guest of American Hospital's Operation Room in İstanbul with his solo exhibition “Curious Moments,” which can be visited until Nov. 2.

His exhibition covers a wide range of works from drawings to a recent video titled “Remains of the Day,” which is on view for the audience in Turkey for the first time. Accompanied with an extensive catalogue on his art practice and art works, Operation Room invites the audience to experience the peculiar universe of Özgür's imagination with a touch of humor, despair, solitude and joy.

Entering the gallery, the audience immediately realizes the upbeat atmosphere. In his photo work, “Let the sunshine in” (2013), we see a man in a black-and-white photo trying to open up the window in a room which looks like an office with a strange mise en scene. Just after this photo, Özgür welcomes us with his work titled “Hypocritical/two faced Bargain” (2012) in which he pays two street painters to draw his face, but one only draws the left part, and the other the right. He bargained with the street artists, paying them only half of what they would normally get. Exhibiting the two drawings of his face next to each other, with a photo of him with the artists working on drawing his face printed on stone, Özgür opens up questions about artistic differences and art work as subject to bargain.

This work, which he designed for Paris, speaks to another work in the exhibition in which a Chinese street artist paints in the special calligraphy the following sentence that also gives the work its title: “I earn 70 euros a day when it's summer.” Here again, by paying the artists what he would get if he paints Özgür's name on the paper, Özgür investigates the art and market relationship.

In another photo series, Özgür creates mise en scenes with young people in which he stages desperate moments in a highly acted and composed ways. With works like “Shipyard diary,” “Somewhere around here” and “Curious moments,” Özgür manages to build up a composition where theatricality goes hand in hand with sincere despair.

In addition to his photos, the exhibition includes many of his drawings which he has created with different techniques from paper to watercolor and sometimes mixing different media. In the drawing series where each drawing takes its name from a month, he reproduces classical paintings with his special drawing style that comes up with little pencil strokes like an impressionist painting. Or in another series where he uses also colored pencils which almost creates a 3D effect, he focuses on one's relation to himself or someone close like in the works “Double Self-Portrait,” “My mum never looks back” or “My mum and Me,” which all date back to 2006.

At the end of the exhibition, the audience sees the video “Remains of Day” which seems like presenting multiple possibilities for various characters in a dream-like atmosphere where reality mixes into the dream or vice versa. In the interview conducted by Derya Yücel for the catalogue, Özgür explains the method behind the video as follows: “My main concern is to explore the possibilities of pluralistic discourse that would emerge through the coming together of different images. While I was making my painting series ‘Land' in the 1990s, I was tearing my drawings and worked in ink on paper to pieces and sprinkling them on canvas. Then I would fix this messy group of pieces of paper on the surface with glue. The images which are initially realistic and recognizable would gain a half-real look through this process of fragmentation. Years later, I implemented a similar fragmentation and reassembling process in ‘Remains of The Day'.” Indeed, Özgür's creation of levels of reality in the video similar to creating layers on a canvas can be clearly seen.

Finishing with the video, the exhibition opens up in the mind of the audience layer by layer, and it becomes clearer to see Özgür's universe of realities and possibilities built and hidden one after another. Both in his drawings and works where he composes the image with objects and figures, there is a search for the second and third meaning, if not a search for a direct reference to artistic practice itself. Masterfully creating works which coincide multiple meanings on different levels without losing the humor, Özgür's artistic practice seems likely to continue blooming.

(Cihan/Today's Zaman)