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Collection of Alternative Common Spaces & Residents
Chasing Fireflies is an experimental documentary series about alternative
common venues which are created for to serve different needs, in different geographies and in different time periods including participants.
“Until it is torn down”: Artists create in abandoned building in Istanbul
“Until it is torn down”
Artists create in an abandoned building in Istanbul
With the idea of Tekay Art Studio, this organization; Emerging with the aim of transforming an emptied building into an exhibition space,
it focused on how to transform it into an exhibition space in a short time by using the materials left by the people who lived in the building before, as well as the works of artists from different disciplines such as painting and graffiti.
Microtopia, named after Nicolas Bourriaud's relational aesthetic theory; It creates the opportunity to re-experience the human relations that had to change with the pandemic, in the exhibition flow, with the building that is expected to be demolished at any moment.
While this discovery process is entirely between the audience and the building, it also goes beyond the usual methods of viewing exhibitions with the materials offered by the building.
The way we perceive the world is more fluid than the binaries of fact and fiction. Throughout the course of each day, we are confronted with continuous feeds of imagery, language, and experiences — some verifiable, some invented, many in between. The distance between the author and the reader has increased into abstraction. On an individual level, many of us select representations of our lives on social media, curating what we want to enforce as an image of ourselves to friends, colleagues, strangers, and perhaps most importantly to ourselves. On a larger scale, history functions as a filter that presents a single image — a limited and reductive version of our shared past.
The exhibition, which took place in five days with an unplanned collective action, includes the individual practices of artists who ask similar questions from time to time while producing art and give their answers with their own means and production methods.
Sixteen artists who do not gather around a particular subject; they have revealed the possibilities offered by the space with limited materials and with their own technical and artistic approaches in the building which is uncertain when it will be demolished.
Proceeding on an experimental basis, the exhibition puts the audience from all walks of life in a process that the audience can discover for themselves, without compelling them to take any conceptual direction.
The unpretentious developing process of an artistic act without hierarchy and expectation opened its doors to the public on November 1, 2020 and will continue until the building is demolished.
This building, which draws an uncanny image when viewed from the outside, leaves the feeling of sincerity and trust in the elegant exhibition spaces to the questioning of the audience with its uncomfortable state.
While the works of the artists in the building, which is expected to be demolished at any moment, disappear with the building and are ready to become a part of the urban transformation, it directs the audience to interpret the inviolability and uniqueness of the artwork.
*This 3D model created with the sounds and images of the microtopia. You can control it by using mouse.