Nasan Tur: Splinter in My Eye

Nasan Tur has a diverse practice that ranges from sculpture, drawing, video, and photography to performance, and installation. Placing observation, analysis, and reproduction at the core of his works, Tur explores political ideologies, subliminal messages, and the symbols of power and dissent. The relationship between production and value and modes of communication as well as variability of people’s perceptions and reactions depending on their cultural background constitute the significant part of the social conditions that the artist observes and indicates.

The exhibition takes its title from an aphorism, “The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying glass,” in Theodor W. Adorno’s book Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, written in 1944-1949 during his exile in the US. Here, Adorno shows how the smallest changes in everyday behavior stand in relation to the most catastrophic events of the twentieth century. Moving forward, Nasan Tur takes on the splinter in the eye as a metaphor, the possibility to get an awareness what it means to see rather than a thing that destructs the ability to see. In the exhibition, Tur works with symbols of power, wealth, and status and questions their existence as well their function inside the society in order to reveal their vulnerability. Could the objects and words Tur chooses as his raw material be more appropriate now, shaping anew as deformed by the artist, for the questions of our society and political situations we are confronted? As he smashes a diamond or destroys the cliches of politicians, Nasan Tur draws attention to the fragile and transient nature of the power that we assume is permanently ours and the value systems that constitute it.

The damaged chandeliers, spectacular and yet dangerous, a photograph that contains the infinity of the universe, and the words hung on the wall, simultaneously familiar and strange, resettle the imagery and their language, as we are familiar from Nasan Tur’s practice. Thus, he disorganizes the value, function, and potentiality of art itself and poses new questions and possibilities. And we are facing one of these questions as we are looking at ourselves in a mirror at the end of the show: Who am I?