Your Mother Was an Angel, Baby! Exhibition Opens at Merdiven Art Space

Kezban Arca Batıbeki, one of the valuable names of contemporary art in Turkey, known for her works on women and popular culture on different platforms since 1984; It is getting ready to meet with art lovers once again with its solo exhibition titled “Your Mother Was an Angel, Baby!…” which was postponed due to the pandemic. The exhibition, which he prepared based on his mother's cinema photographs and the popular media of the period, Fotonovels, and brings together various art practices, opens at Merdiven Art Space on October 19th.

Kezban Arca Batıbeki, who is also known for the prominence of nostalgia elements in his art practice, shares the traces of his childhood with his mother Nurhan Nur, who has an important place in the history of Turkish Cinema, in his new exhibition; He shares his artistic productions with the audience within the framework of cinematographic scenes, photonovels, subculture, cliché, kitsch and pop concepts.

In most of the artist's works, the viewer seems to be navigating through a movie trailer accompanied by familiar emotions. Feeding from the artist's personal memory, from ephemera such as photographs, newspaper pages and objects left over from his family, in short, from his life; His latest exhibition, “Your Mother Was an Angel, My Baby!” It will be an important example of the productions of .

In Kezban Arca Batıbeki's entire art practice, from canvas paintings to photo-collages, installations and short films, images that seem ordinary become icons. Although the artist uses consumer society and pop images, he reshapes these images in his own pictorial/plastic understanding and gives his works a broad social context. In this sense, his handling of the ordinary gets closer to the sociology/history and social memory line rather than aesthetic research. Batıbeki constructs the artistic discourse and the intellectual environment behind his works, using the objects he collects and ephemera. Each object that takes place in the works of the artist metamorphoses as the common equipment of socio-cultural memory and individual experiences. Ultimately, the work is not a rearrangement of accidental elements, but the expression of constitutive relations between objects and experiences. Because, while the objects present a scene of symbols and allegories to the audience, they also create a great mise-en-scène that keeps the artist's memory alive.”

The inner journey of the artist's mother, Nurhan Nur, with her mind and body between the past/present and emotional metaphors between mother/daughter, in contemporary shots made with costumes and poses that refer to real film stills, constitute the starting point of the exhibition. Also in the exhibition, different works such as paintings, space installations and video installations, in which Nur uses selected samples from the shots she made for Fotonovels, which took the place of Turkish Cinema for a while in Turkey, are the works of two different generations; explores their perspectives on their own periods through photography, video, installations and new technology.