Excersize

Vahit Tuna

1st - 25th of May

Masa (table) Contemporary art venue replace in Hafriyat - Karaköy as composing the main element of  the " Exercise " exhibition.

Using different mediums such as graphic, photographs and video; artist recently adds his sound installations. Since the exhibition in Stuttgart in 2003, Tuna is having a solo-exhibition for the first time in Istanbul.

In " Exercise " artist  percepts the venue as a complete area  and reconstructs  the venue of Hafriyat - Karaköy.

With Tuna's  sarcastic point of view, his works deals  with the various  social deformation , paranoia and violence with the effects of nationalism which lately becomes more intense.Against the massive memory loss, tricky remembrance activates the exercise of  resisting and transforming.

The title of Vahit Tuna's "Exercise" exhibition may be a clue for us to use while analysing his works. Contrary to finished, polished, out of the workshop, unifocal works that try to give the "message" directly, he conveys an attitude that shows sometimes experimentalism, sometimes reflection, sometimes coincidence, and sometimes a conscious unfinishedness. In a sense, he does and coached the exercise on today, what we live and what we see. Probably for that reason, you even follow a work that is political from the beginning to the end with a "seriousness" that irony dominates. This is a serious irony of the serious situation we are undergoing today.

In Tuna's exhibition there are graphic works as well as photography, video and sound arrangements... The entrance of the place is closed with a barricade built with sandbags. In other words, there is an arrangement that starts from the outside of the place in this exhibition. The artist also reserves his "Table," the space he had transformed into an exhibition site that various artists found the opportunity to show their works to himself this time. On the Table he displays his eyelashes and cut fingernails which you can see only if you look very carefully. This work that reminds of the self bust that Marc Quinn made with his own blood, can be defined as an innocent self-portrait compared to Quinn's work. Another work of the artist with his own image is "My ...s" which was displayed on billboards during Radikal Art. This work, the work on the Table, and also the refrigerator that the fake sperms of Turkish contemporary artists are stored and displayed allows Tuna to show his approach towards what's happening in contemporary art in an ironic way; and they also make the viewer smile.

The Bonus video on the second floor includes us to the tragicomical picture of the reality and fiction. İkinci kattaki Bonus videosu ise gerçek ile kurgunun, trajikomik görüntüsüne bizi de dahil ediyor. The work that uses a field exercise of the security forces as a resource is also a weird reference to what happens today. It makes it even more interesting that on 1st of May, the opening day of the exhibition these pictures were hurtfully experienced. In the exhibition Vahit Tuna touches the new realities, states and changes that we are altogether drifted to. Criticism has got into the whole exhibition finely but it makes you smile, and it makes you think; where we are and how we are...

About The Exhibition and Vahit Tuna:

Erden Kosova

http://egzersiz2008.blogspot.com/2008/12/erden-kosova.html

Kamil Şenol

http://egzersiz2008.blogspot.com/2008/12/kamil-enol.html

Ayşegül Sönmez

http://egzersiz2008.blogspot.com/2008/12/ayegl-snmez-sylei-giri-yazs.html

Esra Aliçavuşoğlu

http://egzersiz2008.blogspot.com/2008/12/esra-aliavuolu.html

Borga Kantürk

http://egzersiz2008.blogspot.com/2008/12/borga-kantrk.html

Exhibition Artists

• Vahit Tuna