VOLKAN ASLAN
A Day Not Yet Lived
6 June – 5 July,
2014
press release
A Day Not Yet Lived, 6 June – 5 July 2014, is Istanbul based
Turkish artist Volkan Aslan's
inaugural solo
exhibition at Pi Artworks, London and first major show in the UK.
For the exhibition,
the artist will transform the gallery with an ambitious, site-specific
installation that
will act as an
unconventional platform for his well-known broken figurine series.
Time is a trajectory
segmented into regular, repeatable, and measurable units
- seconds, minutes, hours, and days, yet our
perception of its passage is far less simple
and linear due to the act of remembering and
forgetting.
Aslan’s recent
practice is influenced by the artist’s memories
and the malleability
of our perception of the passing of time.
These memories, half
remembered half forgotten, draw him to certain items
he comes across on
his day-to-day business that remind him of past experiences.
These found objects
are then playfully manipulated to form surreal constructions
that fuse his personal associations with new
and unexpected interpretations.
The Fragile series of
work from this exhibition is inspired by nostalgia for the artist’s childhood.
A key memory of this
period was visiting the houses of friends and relatives
and seeing decorative
ceramic statuettes in prominent glass display cabinets,
but not being allowed
to play with them.
As a young adult he
began collecting ornaments reminiscent of those from his childhood,
but it was not long
before these delicate,
mass produced items
got cracked and broken as he moved from one house to another,
leading to the urge
to glue one broken part onto that of another.
Gradually this
process of breaking and mending transformed from a weekend activity
with little aspiration of being a serious
creative process into an obsessive creative template.
Aslan uses this
procedural template of repeatedly shattering these ornaments,
compiling the broken
pieces, and then amalgamating them
as the mechanism for
the creation of a series of nameless,
hybrid configurations
with jarring characteristics.
Within this approach,
the traditional planning and blueprints
that characterizes
most approaches to art making
don’t exist and the
act of conception and production take place simultaneously
in single, destructive acts.
There is also
something very endearing in his deliberate rejection of the constraints
that stopped him from playing with the
figurines as a child.
For A Day Not Yet Lived, the artist has produced creatures
that appear to be
straight out of folk legends or mythology,
yet backstories or
scripted journey for these figures don’t actually exist
and Aslan
deliberately leaves the viewer to shape the character’s stories.
About Volkan Aslan:
Solo exhibitions in
Istanbul include Don’t Forget to Remember
at Arter – Space for Art (2013);
Volkan at Macka Art
Gallery (2011); Unstable Repetition
at Pi Artworks (2011);
and Volkan Aslan in
Istanbul at Under Construction
(2007).
Group exhibitions
have taken place as far and wide as Turkey, Morocco, Lebanon, the UAE,
USA, Italy, Germany,
France and Brazil and his work was included in the 2013 Istanbul Biennial.
Aslan’s work is
included in a number of Turkish collections,
including the Özyeğin University collection
and
Arter – Space for
Art, an initiative of The Vehbi Koç Foundation.
Aslan is also
co-founder of 5533, a non-profit independent art space in Unkapanı, Istanbul.
Pi ARTWORKS London
55 Eastcastle Street
London W1W 8EG
Tel:+44 207 637 8403
Pi ARTWORKS Istanbul
İstiklal Cad. Mısır
Apt 163/4 Galatasaray
Tel: +90 212 293 71
03