|
AYÇESU DURAN
8 NOVEMBER 2019 - 14 DECEMBER 2019
PİLOT hosts the first solo exhibition of Ayçesu Duran ‘Three Days Two Nights’ between November 8 and December 14, 2019.
Three Days Two Nights focuses on the conflicting human urge to romanticize nature while trying to dominate it viciously, as well as looking for parallels between the primitive and the contemporary ways of living. In her work, Ayçesu Duran seeks to challenge the feeling of familiarity to the point that it collapses in itself and opens a portal to fantasy.
The exhibition derives its name from one of the many timeframes defined by the societal order of our day. Also known as ‘long weekend’, the phrase represents a getaway to an alternative reality with an urgency to turn back. This brief escape is often from urban to rural, manifesting a contemporary fable. Through three dimensional reminders of these clashing environments, the artist explores the various ways in which humankind systematizes, interprets, utilizes, transforms, names, shapes, glorifies and sacralizes nature.
Objects designed by humans for humans and the natural products appropriated by humanity is fundamental to the artist’s practice. Utilizing everyday objects in deliberate combinations instead of creating a form from scratch lets the artist challenge the preconditioned perception of reality in order to create her own narrative as an artist. For this exhibition, she places the dialectical relationship between human behaviour and these ‘readymades’ in under close scrutiny.
Duran considers functional everyday objects as anthropomorphic ones, naturally carrying trails of human characteristics, just like offsprings. From their sensors set to control greed, to their physical orientation, these gadgets stand as abstracted human figures in artist’s works. Another group of objects that are widely used by the artist are the organic ones, products of nature that are falsely regarded as the property of humankind. This group expands from beeswax to sunflower seeds. The last group is situated in between the first two; materials and systems that are manufactured by humankind to imitate the ‘natural’. Such as faux fur, cans of wall paint in altered shades of nature to decorate our homes, or even an air hockey table utilizing a mechanism to mimic the qualities of ice.
Once the French poet Lautréamont wrote: “as beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella”. This infamous remark reflects the spirit of Three Days Two Nights because it was written as a simile to describe a young boy; a simile completely consisted of inanimate objects in order to portray a human being. In a similar manner, the artist utilizes the non-living to paint a subtle portrait of humankind as a species.
Ayçesu Duran was born and raised in Mediterranean Turkey as the daughter of two agricultural engineers whose passion for ecology sow the seeds of her curiosity in nature. Duran graduated from Slade School of Fine Art in 2016 with a BA degree in Sculpture. Although she specialized in sculpture, her practice isn’t about producing a single piece of mass, but about creating multiple offspring of a certain thought. She also worked as the Editor-in-Chief of an online daily science, technology and innovation publication for two years where she was able to get an in-depth knowledge on some of the subject matters that drive her as an artist.