ArtRooms Art Gallery in Girne, Turan Aksoy and his exhibition ‘All the Demons’….
By Heidi Trautmann….
I want to refer to a text Johann Pillai wrote as an introduction to his thoughts about Turan Aksoy’s exhibition; it meets with my impression of the exhibition I recently visited in the ArtRooms at The House, an exhibition curated by Oya Silbery, and again so well done.
“All the demons” normally reside in a mythical place called pandemonium – disorder or hell – but some appear in paintings like Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (a fantasy of bodily and material pleasures which are released between the sterility of heaven and the chaos of hell), and in works of literature like García Márquez’s Of Love and Other Demons. Others take over the mind: the urges, fantasies, dreams, fears and nightmares that become obsessions; the evil spirits that possess people in occult traditions and Abrahamic religions; the creatures made of fire and air in Middle Eastern religious mythologies; and the genies of the Thousand and One Nights who represent wishes and desires – the genies of the ring and the lamp in the story of Aladdin, or the genie in a bottle, let out and then tricked back into it by a fisherman…
My first thought was indeed the immediate connection to Hieronymus Bosch’s ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’ and the impact it had on me was: a cold technical view, a fragmentation of the basic human feeling of love into naked lust, voyeurism.
The artist is dissecting a topic that rules the world, in a collection of works over a period of time in his life, drawings, paintings, and 3-dimensional works, but among all of it a humble innocent small pencil drawing which made me shake my head in wonder.
Art is the mirror of society. The exhibition fits perfectly into our times of brutality against women which we have experienced again lately and it reminds us that we should all take more care of how we live with each other.
The exhibition is still on until March 22, 2023, daily from 12.00 during the opening times of The House restaurant.
The biography I have taken from ARUCAD website:
Prof. Dr. Turan Aksoy, Dept. of Plastic Arts, ARUCAD. Born in 1964, M. Turan Aksoy received his undergraduate degree from Gazi University (1986), his graduate degree from Hacettepe University (1989) and his doctorate from the University of Central England.
The artist, who worked as a lecturer at Hacettepe University, Yıldız Technical University and Yeditepe University, also served as a visiting lecturer at the Stuttgart Art Academy, Germany.
Selected Recent Solo Exhibitions: 2015 A Portrait; Restless, Pi Art Gallery, Istanbul. 2015 Manageable Paradise, Milli Reasürans Art Gallery, Istanbul. 2013 A Portrait; Restless, Pi Art Gallery, Istanbul. 2011 Dust and Bustle, Pi Art Gallery, Istanbul. 2010 Shiny Thing, Pi Art Gallery, Istanbul
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