Dirimart is thrilled to host and announce two new solo exhibitions by Sarkis. Titled 85 Screams: After Munch and Sarkis’ Films respectively, the exhibitions meet the audience simultaneously at Dirimart’s Dolapdere and Pera galleries, where the exhibited works address the interactions and time lapses across the artist’s past artworks and exhibitions.
Sarkis engages in a permanent dialogue with his artworks during their creation process. Each of them, approached by the artist as a character on its own, is born, breaths in, breaths out, washes up under the lights of different colours, gets warm, engages in solidary among each other, and makes an appearance. Involved in a constant dialogue among each other at the artist’s studio in Villejuif, Paris, these artworks gear up for their particular spaces and contexts that lie in the patterns at Sarkis’ mind. When invited to an exhibition, they commune with the space-time where they are situated, coming into being with their pasts. Each time they are re-performed, they are rejuvenated through their re-birth, and the new artworks come into being as part of an intellectual stream where the new ones connect to their predecessors.
85 Screams: After Munch is based on a series titled 100 Screams: After Munch, which Sarkis created between November 2014 and January 2015. Drawn from the figure in Munch’s Scream, which Sarkis came across in his early childhood and has resonated in many of his works for many years, the series comprises 100 oil on paper pieces (32 x 24 cm).
In this series, Sarkis attempts to embrace the speed of a human scream, conveying distinctive screams on paper with white and red oil paints as they come out of the paint tubes without using any brush. In the exhibition, the first 85 of them are showcased on the occasion of Sarkis’ 85th birthday. The oil painting artworks are lined up one after another, like a film strip, starting with the one that denotes the artist’s birth year, 1938, creating an autobiographical cycle in the exhibition space. Among these artworks, which can also be perceived as self-portraits, 22 of them are accompanied by stained glass windows, one for each year that Sarkis considers a milestone in his life, starting with the year of his birth. In this way, a pattern is presented to the audience in an autobiographical manner, intertwining the artworks’ years of creation, the ages Sarkis attaches importance to and the present time.
Sarkis’ Films, on the other hand, features 16 films in 16mm that Sarkis created at Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains, where he was invited to its opening in 1997. The films provide visual clues as to why and how the artworks of Sarkis, who has engaged in a prolific creation process since the 1960s to present day, shall be elaborated in each presentation. Recorded in a single take using the 16mm film technique, these unedited films capture the artist’s execution of his scripts that he wrote as if he describes his rituals. With this series of consecutively structured 16 films, the audience finds the opportunity to experience Sarkis’ unique cinematic language.
Location: Dirimart Dolapdere
