'point zero I'

'point zero I'

Antonio Cosentino, Ceren Oykut,Gökçe Er,
Gözde Ilkin, Tayfun Serttas

artSumer's opening exhibition in Karaköy is Point Zero, an exhibition conceived by the artists. Point Zero, simultaneous with the biennial, is a reference to the agenda that changes every two years: between exploration and conditioning, on the line between forgetting and remembering. It is about stories that lost their protagonists with neutralized centers and interrupted history with its people.

The artists included in the exhibition engage with the two extremes; sometimes with antagonism, sometimes a detached singularity, corroding the concept of zero. Ceren Oykut performs an archaeological dig of Yarımburgaz Cave, one of the oldest sites in Istanbul. A non-existant area in a blind spot, buried under layers of buildings, timeless, placeless, in the void. Antonio Cosentino takes the viewer to an imaginary space... The cliffs described by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar in his novel Huzur [Serenity]. Cosentino re-produces this narrative, changing the characters' names in the same but different space, searching for a feeling of closeness that is also distant, coping with produced identities and set perceptions... Gözde İlkin asks this question with her state ID, by ruining its legitimacy. Between the mother's name and the father's name, blue and pink, single and married, how much of the identification has been pre-determined by social, sexual and religious norms? She exposes the in-between area in which there is no recording. A moment where the identification has been zeroed, a moot point.
Tayfun Serttaş, who works with roots and origins, history and historical narratives, brings two strollers to Istanbul from Beirut, dating back to the first quarter of the century. The strollers that the French used on Beirut's streets during the years of colonialism, now host two black men doing a tug of war. The artist, who researches the indicators on which experiential flows between different memory centers are constructed, subtly greets the post-colonial cyclical atmosphere now witnessing the Arab Spring.