Dirimart is proud to announce the third solo exhibition by Özlem Günyol & Mustafa Kunt with the gallery, the artist duo who employs methods, such as translation, coding, deconstruction, classification, addition and layering in their works. The exhibition of the duo, which seeks an aesthetic of rearranging things by separating them into fragments and disconnecting them from their physicality and contexts with great precision and diligence, can be seen at Dirimart Dolapdere between 20 March and 28 April 2024.
Upfalling Ones showcases seven artworks, including four new ones by Günyol & Kunt, offering a humorous perspective on the expression of power through the physical size or height of things. The exhibition is a highly intricate ensemble of objects that the duo re-elaborates and re-addresses in their different works invariably, bringing public space monuments closer to the audience by transforming them into the objects of everyday life, such as carpets, stairs or climbing walls, and conveying them into the exhibition space as players: a flagpole of life-size dimensions, appearing as a wall pattern at the exhibition, can serve as a material for video work, while a public space sculpture serving to four entirely different projects at the same time.
Bringing the power symbolising objects together at the exhibition space by reducing them to the human scale, Upfalling Ones establishes a new human-centred order rather than a hierarchical one that subordinates humans. Transforming the objects of an order in which power is defined by size and height, the exhibition opens up a space for multiple interpretations by bringing these objects to the viewer’s level.
Welcoming visitors to the exhibition space, Neither Up nor Down contains the 1:1 scale model of a section of stairs leading to the world’s highest flagpole in a 3-hectare square in Baku. The work is drawn from the similarities of stairs with flagpoles: stairs have the primary function of upward/downward movement, like flagpoles as the respresentative of power, and they form a vertical, almost sacred path to power, like giant flagpoles, diminishing people even further with each step towards the base. Based on that, the artwork disrupts this vertical representation by shifting the perspective horizontally. By rendering the stairs dysfunctional when placed parallel to the ground, it separates them from the path to power.
Spanning the walls of the exhibition space, the Self-portrait series shows the world’s largest flagpoles in life-size dimensions. These self-portraits, folded dozens of times to fit into the exhibition space pictorially, bend the flagpoles in a movement that is the complete opposite of their function, almost bowing them in front of the viewers.
A performance installation titled Free Solo is a climbing wall project for which the duo creates replicas of the accessible parts of numerous statues and monuments in Frankfurt, Istanbul, and Çanakkale. According to the artists, while monuments bring people together in celebrations and/or protests, many people also tend to climb them during these gatherings, and this desire – the desire to rise beyond physical existence by benefiting from the power of the monument at that time and place – constitutes the starting point of the artwork.
At the centre of the exhibition floor lies the artwork titled Clock, blurring the concepts of time, space, and place: as a clock on the ground cannot tell time without lines and numbers and the way it displays time depends on the viewer’s position, the time changes with each person. Since it has no reference point, it blurs the perception of time as it rotates on its axis, making it unable to respond to the system it operates within.
The clock is circled by the installation titled Possibilities for a Sculpture which focuses on monumental public space sculptures in different geographies, depicting the human figure in various forms. Transforming the sculptures’ poses into written instructions and arranged in the size of the projection of the sculptures’ pedestals, these carpets are placed on the gallery floor, aligning it with the upper points of these pedestals. Each viewer reading the instructions creates a temporary version of these sculptures, while the objects placed on the carpets or the people standing on them turn into temporary new sculptures of these pedestals.
Higher than the Ground, Lower than the Sky consists of fixed ascending stairs indicating the pedestal heights of public space sculptures in different cities. Pedestals serve the function of lifting things placed on them, yet in the installation, their heights converge with the bodies of the stairs, the tools of the up-and-down movement. Therefore, the installation both diverts an object with daily use from its function and gives it a new function. The irregularly arranged steps of the stairs draw a portrait of the hierarchal order in the public space, while the possibility of moving the steps when necessary shows that this hierarchy can be reconstructed at any moment. Higher than the Ground, Lower than the Sky also allows it to be read as a measuring object indicating the invisible layers rising from the ground.
Finally, the video work titled Cityscapes allows viewers to observe various places of the city from the perspective of twelve monuments in Istanbul, which are, due to their historical significance and views, photographed or filmed endlessly on any given day. While a stationary camera captures seemingly ordinary angles at first glance, belonging to 12 different ‘heroes’, it allows the viewer to experience the city in almost life-sized dimensions, adding a new perspective to all these images. Cityscapes shares the unique perspective of the monument’s main character, making it accessible to everyone.
Upfalling Ones can be viewed at Dirimart Dolapdere from 20 March to 28 April 2024.
Photo: Yarat Contemporary Art Space
Location: Dirimart Dolapdere
