From Hakan Akçura (Catalogue)

Through out centuries, the uniqueness of the art object and its content has been embraced and protected as one of the fundamental principals in art history. Therefore, the uniqueness of “the moment” was held sacred as much as the uniqueness of the art object.

In contemporary art, the artists who adopted creating work in multiples as a confrontation of this notion battled against the value given to the uniqueness of the art object. However the uniqueness of the “identities” and the “time” displayed in the frame of the art object has been preserved by these artists.

The same artists, confronting the value given to the uniqueness of the art object, abandoned the classical painting techniques from which this notion originated. In arguing for multiples, they adopted printmaking due to its nature that allows for creating multiples.

The series that “…self” consists of chose to take on a different stand point and present a different perspective in this argument.

Is the true that I sometimes use a voyeuristic gaze in my work. This gaze that found shape in my piece, “Window”, exhibited during the 4th International İstanbul Biennial, plays an important role in my creative process. Resembling “Window”, the “…self” series also construct an art-game playing with the different states the same figures are in accordance to changing time and light. However this time the figures are related to each other when viewed from canvas to canvas, and to themselves when the content, suggested by the title of each diptych, is taken into consideration.

The series, “…self”, is playfully confronting seldom discussed conventions dealing with the uniqueness of the art object and its content.

Although this confrontation is of a conceptual nature, the possibility of a traditional consumption of the paintings is not prevented. To provide this, I specifically chose to use the painting technique involving the four elements; paint, brush, spatula, canvas.

The reason I used technical references of painting without a particular argument is rather obvious; I enjoy the stress itself, being stuck in this passage, and the potential of indefinite new results unpredictable to me, that will be recreated through the viewers. I approve of this clash.

I believe that our identities, old and “turning every one of us into someone else at the same time”, precursed by Rimbaud in the dawn of our century, will complete the incomplete part of the statement this exhibition wishes to make, in the dawn of a new millenium.

Hakan Akçura