Articles & Videos

Solus Locus – Arter Museum Istanbul – March 30th to December 31th, 2022

I am very happy to share with you about the participation of my wife and international Israeli artist Yehudit Sasportas in the exhibition Solos Locus at Arter Museum in Istanbul, Turkey – curated by Selen Ansen. The incredible depth and transmission speaks for itself and holds a very powerful artistic voice that speaks the unspeakable out of the depth of the collective unconscious. Yehudit was a guest in the Collective Trauma Summit the last two years, demonstrating the vital role that artists play in revealing the unseen architecture of individual, ancestral, and collective trauma. With Love, Thomas

 

“… The exhibition brings together a selection of works from the Arter collection with site-specific new productions and existing works. Devised around the concept of nature, the exhibition invites the audience on a journey through subterranean, heavenly and terrestrial realms, subconscious territories, past and lost or fantasized and never-existed places and various landscapes. Spread throughout the the 3rd and 4th-floor gallery spaces of Arter, Locus Solus aims to rethink the relationships between the mineral, vegetal, animal and human lives and the ways in which nature and culture intertwine with each other. The works on display, each forming a world in its own right, propose reflecting upon nature as a cultural and historical construction nourished and shaped by mythologies, collective beliefs and rituals, individual stories and experiences, social fears, and desires.”

Selen Ansen, curator, from the Exhibition Locus Solus text, March 2022

 

 

 

“…Produced in the context of the exhibition Locus Solus, No-Man’s Land is a site-specific installation that articulates existing works of various media by Sasportas, thus materializing a junction between image, sound, sculpture and architecture. The installation is an integral part of the Liquid Desert Project that the artist has been elaborating over the past 7 years with the aim of mapping individual and collective subconscious space. Conceived as a conceptual apparatus for investigating the mechanisms of the human psyche that enable one to participate in reality or to forget, reject, and deny it, the Liquid Desert project brings to the surface a negative subterranean site – a bunker virtually situated in the Negev Desert (in southern Israel), consisting in total of 3 underground levels and 49 rooms. Featuring the Room No.10, the installation presented at Arter is derived from two black walls that function as dividers and thresholds, supports and surfaces.

 

 

 

“The architectural structure of the room serves as a container for repressed/non-verbalized emotions, while the works that take place in it activate/transform an unspoken life material which exists in the collective subconscious outside of language and time. These works explore the invasion of the surface by suppressed subconscious material, and in doing so, delve into the unsettling correspondence between unspoken, unseen and subconscious life materials, and the ways in which these layers of information activate and establish the psyche’s visible surface. They enable the act of witnessing by communicating materials of tension, contradiction, conflict and crisis: materials that charge the system energetically but cannot be verbally expressed.”

Selen Ansen, curator, About Yehudit Sasportas work, March 2022.

 

 

 

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No-Man’s Land – The Time Dwellers

Room no.10, The Liquid Desert Project | Yehudit Sasportas

 

Locus Solus, is the second museum exhibition to manifest the Liquid Desert Project, with the installation: No-Man’s Land – The Time Dwellers, in which Sasportas pursues her years-long, process-based project that builds complex correspondences between the human psyche, human-made architecture and natural sites. Corresponding with her installations that have been exhibited during the past years in various spaces, contexts and settings across Europe, No-Man’s Land provides visitors with a new reading of the Liquid Desert’s architectural structure and its wider cultural context. The Liquid Desert Project’s virtual and metaphysical rooms function as a cinematic arena for the emergence of films, as well as unique artistic processes, such as curatorship ventures, conferences and special cooperation activities with international artists.

The different rooms host the reflections of actual art works from the fields of drawing, sculpture, sound and video – which are simultaneously exhibited in an encoded and partial manner in the visible public sphere. This creates a unique correspondence between a physical and visible field and its hidden underground and metaphysical counterpart. The actual art works can be seen by the public at the museum, and from there they maintain an active conversation/resonance with the metaphysical site throughout the exhibition.

According to tradition, the northern Negev Desert where the Liquid Desert site is situated, is the place of a historic dialogue between the human dimension in the form of Abraham and a divine presence – as demonstrated by the change in Abraham’s name – from Avram to Avraham, introducing the Hebrew letter ה (H) which symbolizes in the simplest and deepest sense the acknowledgment of God’s presence in the manifest physical world. In this respect, the Liquid Desert project deals with the movement of structures and the lively dialogue between the overt dimension of our life and the hidden one – the one which contains important information essential for the actual movement.

 

 

Our collective subconscious sphere as a society functions as an invisible storage of life materials which have been repressed, denied and exiled in the course of our personal and collective historical journey, while frequently surfacing as enigmatic and bothersome events secretly running reality. These life materials have been processed and translated into an active component of mute art works which re-activate them in the form of physical works. In this framework, the Liquid Desert project produces a discourse with the outer limits of human knowledge, where the art works expose crucial and relevant subjects pertinent to current times. The dialogue takes place with liminal and edgy places and relates in its essence to the subject of collective trauma, which causes indifference to various issues within our culture and society that we have not yet taken full responsibility for.

 

 

 

 

 

For Sasportas, the works of art function as a means to re-code key issues of the collective subconscious, creating movement from inwards toward upwards, likened to the agitation of the deepest levels of the subconscious. Thus, the Liquid Desert site offers a new and different mode of contemporary and advanced thinking in the form of a lively conversation with our world of shadows as a society and culture.

 

 

Read more about the Liquid Desert project:

 

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About Arter Museum

Instigated in 2007 and conceived on an international basis, Arter museum has presented 35 exhibitions from 2010 to 2018 at its building on Istiklal Street. The museum moved to its new building in Istanbul’s Dolapdere district in September 2019, designed by Grimshaw Architects. Within the building, a wide range of spaces are interlinked and create proximate exhibition areas for film, video, music, dance, literature and traditional arts. The building, with its angular volumes, perforated geometric ceramic panels and triple-height openings, is in striking contrast with the surrounding urban fabric of dilapidated houses and informal constructions clinging onto the hillsides, with family living rooms opening onto the streets and alleys that trail between small-scale factories, scrap dealers and smoky tea houses. The center is run by the Vehbi Koç foundation, funded by Turkey’s largest industrial conglomerate, known for its inconspicuous opposition to the government. Arter is considered a reference point for contemporary art and non-aligned culture in a country where freedom of expression is narrowing.

More Info about the Museum

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This exhibition was produced with the support and assistance of the Arter museum and with the professional work in full cooperation with the magnificent team:

SELEN ANSEN / Curator
GİZEM USLU TÜMER / Exhibitions Manager
DUYGU DOĞAN / Technical Production Manager
ALPER DEMİRBAŞ / Exhibitions Assistant Coordinator
ERDAL HAMAMCI / Technical Production Coordinator
DİDEM URALER CELIK / Graphic Design Specialist
UTKU URAL / Exhibitions Assistant Coordinator
ECE AK / Production Specialist

Address Arter Museum: Irmak Caddesi No: 13 Dolapdere, Beyoğlu 34435 İstanbul, Turkey
T: +90 212 708 58 00
Opening times: Tuesday-Sunday, 11:00 – 18:00
Website: www.arter.org.tr

copyright 2022 © Yehudit Sasportas & VG Bild-Kunst