The Minaret

(the) Nature of (the) Material
Curated by Adnan Yıldız in dialogue with Kristina Kramer
Polistar, Istanbul, 6-6/ 7-7-2014
Artists: Ziad Antar, Ulrike Buck, Pia Maria Martin, Ceren Oykut, Sophie Reinhold, Florian Zeyfang

The Minaret, Ceren Oykut, pen and pencil on pvc (approx 400 cmx150 cm), 2014
The inhabitants of Istanbul sometimes have to share their living spaces with a minaret. There is a minaret located in line with the windows of Ceren Oykut’s studio in Istanbul. The fact that Polistar, the exhibition venue, also shared the same fate with Oykut’s studio, inspired this work. In her work called Minaret, Ceren Oykut dreams of a planet (limbo/inferno/paradiso) where minarets gather and shout, faint and sober up. And this planet is located on the bottom of a long rolling paper. (In memory of Turhan Selçuk who wrote and drew the Marvellous Adventures of Abdülcanbaz, where the minarets were spacecrafts and flew deep into the space.)

The exhibition project, “(the) Nature of (the) Material” aims to develop conceptual awareness on the transforming relationships that we establish and reestablish with things; objects, images and moments in everyday life. As the first presentation of a potentially long term research project, it determines İstanbul as its first location of becoming an exhibition room. It proposes the series of five articles entitled ‘’The Meaning of Materials‘’ written by Frank Lloyd Wright and first published by Architectural Record (during April-November 1928) as a reference point and parallel reading. It intends to go back to these texts with critical gestures. The selected works are presented together on the basis of a curatorial motivation that the exhibit reformulates such terms as ‘nature, integrity, frank expression’ that depart from the reference of ‘the nature of the material’- clearly defined through these articles- and its further discussions. For the opening event, there will be a discussion program, which is based on a diagonal relationship between the location and timing of the exhibition -about the transforming topography of the city.