Es War Einmal In Einer Unbekannten Zukunft / Once Upon A Time In An Unknown Future
curated by Özgür Erkök Moroder and Kristina Kramer
Exhibition part of 48 Stunden Neukölln Festival, Umspannwerk, Richards 20, Berlin
14/16-06-2019
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The Black Curtain, a time-lapse extract of the video
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The Black Curtain is the name of the video recording in which Ceren Oykut documented her improvised drawing session in her studio in Berlin. Darkening her room with black curtains, she draws, scratches, writes, erases, cuts, distorts and reverses her digital black and white images that she reflects across the walls. Oykut flows along with the reflections of shapes and continuously intervenes in the process, opens spaces and creates scenes that transform spontaneously within the process of active imagination. By mediating, she surrenders to the moments to manifest as tameless shapes and while she is using her room as a surface of a living sketchbook, she also lets the space turn into a cave.
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The Black Curtain / digital drawing, at the end of the session, the drawing is now static and mostly in a zoomed state on the computer screen. When she zooms out, Oykut can see a map of the whole process.
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Once Upon A Time In An Unknown Future, exhibition view, Richards 20, Berlin, 2019
Fotos by Erman Torun & Özgür Erkök Moroder 2019
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Artists: Mika Satomi & Hannah Perner-Wilson (Kobakant, JP/AT), Ceren Oykut (TR), Ibrahim Quraishi (Kenia), Ingo Randolf (AT), Johannes Vogl (DE)
“I’m more interested in the future than in the past, because the future is where I intend to live.” Albert Einstein
We find ourselves in the midst of an accelerated present and we’ve already outpaced numerous events predicted by oracles, seers and astrologers―or not. They say the future is written in the stars, but that’s where we were decades ago. And the years 1984 and 2001 are long past, but nevertheless the future seems to catch up with us again.
The exhibition “Once Upon a Time in an Unknown Future” explores from an artistic perspective the connection between technology, (social) progress and art in the broadest sense and thus offers a field of experimentation for future, present and imagination.
In today’s world, the extraordinary is the norm. We only react instead of acting proactively, the extraordinary permeating our lives and numbing our ability to react. The news reads more fantastically than comic books, and so it seems no coincidence that in recent years there has been an increase in science fiction productions that propose varying perspectives on future bodies, identities, cultures, architecture, everyday life, and social and political structures. From today’s perspective, they allow a different view into the future and vice versa- a different lens on the past. And so the future, as unattainable as it is, serves as a gigantic projection screen for countless “what if” scenarios.
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ceren oykut 