28 Feb Balikli Village

‘Although the term Sayfiye/ ‘cottage’ is defined as ‘a rural area close to the city’, for most of us it means a yearly break from the fast rhythm of modern urban life. These places, which are defined through the act of escaping from the city, mostly take form in ‘summer houses’ built on the shores that meet the sea. It is possible to read the traces of this culture, which gives a break to the daily hustle and bustle with its own routine and rules, most clearly in our personal histories that form the building blocks of social memory. This is perhaps precisely why Tanıl Bora and Aksu Bora, in the introduction to the book of the same name, define sayfiye as ‘ultimately the memory of childhood’.

In her solo exhibition on 28 February-24 March 2020, Nazlı Gürgan pursues the representations of the countryside in her own memories with a similar approach and finds these forms of expression in the common memories shared by the generation that was able to live their childhood before the end of the last century. The works, which sometimes indirectly and sometimes directly reflect the projections of the artist’s cottage life, feed on memories and construct objects, events, situations and actions that are the subjects of the modernisation dynamics that an entire generation has been exposed to as actors of the visual narrative.

Gürgan uses these objects, which he places at the centre of the compositions, to reveal the aesthetic patterns to which he constructs his own belonging, and presents them to us on backgrounds composed of the silhouettes of similar figures. While the textures consisting of the repetition of motifs vibrate in the background, they establish a subjective dialogue with the narrative in the foreground. These textures both wink at the behavioural patterns and comfort zones that have become routine in our modern lives, and also constitute a décor interwoven with the connotations of other objects belonging to the world of the countryside such as tablecloths, sunshades, dresses, beach towels, wallpapers, floor tiles. The works produced with the screen printing method, one of the graphic reproduction techniques, also make a professional reference to these similar design objects printed with the same technique. These graphic prints, which bear the traces of a light and sincere life, turn into the perpetrators of a never-ending season in a ‘collection’ consisting of fifteen pieces.’

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