‘Memento*’graph / An Epistle of Keepsakes

(*) Memento:
General use: Souvenir, memory, remembrance, keepsake
Religious: One of the two commemorative prayers made during the Roman Catholic communion
Old use: Reminder, caution, warning

The Maçka Art Gallery (Maçka Sanat Galerisi, or MSG) was founded in 1976 by Rabia Çapa and her sister who passed away in 1989, Varlık Yalman Sadıkoğlu, in an 80 m2 space, in a moment as short as eternity.

Moment: Moment

Architect Mehmet Konuralp (b.1939), winner of the Sinan Award, furnished every inch of MSG with raw ceramic tiles measuring 10 x 10 cm, displaying the characteristics of ancient Egyptian funerary architecture, as a soul mate of the Tombs of the Nobles at Luxor.

Moment: Significance

Yet, contrary to popular belief, this was no a place of valediction, but of birth; and according to historians, Luxor was the site of the kingdom’s rejuvenation, and rumour has it that, the conceptual and physical coronation site of young pharaohs.

Moment: Essence

The same took place at MSG. The gallery was the birthplace of many firsts for contemporary art in Turkey, and it was transformed into both a physical and metaphysical graph-notebook. The gallery produced a source of ‘sketches’ / ‘drawings’ / ‘drafts’ aimed at experiencing the ‘moment’, or life, via contemporary art, in a consecutive ‘routine’ of uniqueness, both for its artists and for its every new viewer.

Moment: Force

With this dialectical parenthesis opened on bail to being and nothingness, the gallery became a monumental reference to both the womb and the otherworldly atmosphere of the grave.

Moment: Meeting place

Konuralp’s structure (1), designed waist-high underground and with a vision of the ‘fetus’ / ‘embryo’ experience, became a source of culture where the earth was worked and life and (im-) mortality were sowed and reaped, sustaining, transforming and seeing off its artists to the future, like a Phoenix.

Moment: Time

So the gallery accompanied the artists, within the structure of a rising and setting ‘time and space’, on behalf of brand new images and concepts. MSG’s lighting design was carried out by Şazi Sirel (b.1923), and its graphic design by Mengü Ertel (b.1931-d.2000); and the gallery became a hub of exhibitions with a loving and respectful maternal air. And MSG fulfilled this task with a libertarian stance and responsibility. In this way, as the ‘adult’s in the gallery became ‘young’er in the spirit of the time with every new exhibition they opened, the young proudly inhaled this historical seniority they assumed. Likewise, the ‘foreigner’s became ‘local’s of the gallery, while figures who departed from here, became artists of the world.

Moment: Interval

However, after 40 years, Rabia Çapa took the decision to close the gallery in 2016, transferring its archive to the Vehbi Koç Foundation. This sad development also provided the occasion for Çapa to collaborate with art critic, curator and historian Dr. Necmi Sönmez to act as editors of ‘Görünmeyene Bakmak/Looking at the Invisible’ a documentary history in decades of the no less than 205 exhibitions held at the gallery, accompanied by the art historical views of different writers.

Moment: Influence

However… then came a moment, the kind that ‘only happens once in 40 years’, which also provided the occasion for the writing of this text: After Didem Çapa took over the baton from her mother Rabia Çapa, MSG decided, in November 2021, to open its doors once again.

Moment: Importance

Already a fountain of revival and transformation, the gallery focused, both via physical and digital perspective, on the past, present and future appearance of the ‘Moment’ in its first exhibition after five years, that will be held from 16 November to 18 December 2021.

Moment: Instant

This new exhibition titled ‘Moment’ is the combined product of the labours of Serhat Kiraz (b.1954), who held his first solo exhibition at MSG from 10 February to 10 March 1984 (2), which was also the first ‘site-specific’ event at the gallery and also held two more exhibitions here, ‘Translation’, held from 23 November to 25 December 1993, and ‘Construction-Reconstruction’ held from 6 February to 10 March 2007, and artist Hakan Gündüz (b.1977) (3).

Moment: Moment

This Moment transformed each and every mind and labourer it represents, whether it be Kiraz, Gündüz or the gallery, into a Phoenix, arising from their ashes.

Moment: Lahza (from Arabic, an indivisible fragment of time)

According to the Phoenician Sanchuniathon, as in Chinese mythology, Egyptian religion and Greek mythology that would follow, the Phoenix was a legendary, mythical bird of fire. Called Simurgh or Anqa in Persian mythology and Zümrüd-ü Anka or Simurg-u Anka in Turkish mythology, or Tuğrul in earlier times, there are versions of this bird in the legends of many nations. This provided a symbolism without compare for the many Phoenixes that landed and then flew away from the gallery. (3)

Moment: Specific period

Kiraz and Gündüz, in their mortal exhibition titled ‘Moment/An’ that will ‘live its life’ for a specific period (from 16 November to 18 December 2021, according to the Gregorian calendar) contemplated how they may propel to the other ‘Phoenix’es that will land in the gallery, a concept permanent through its variability, in other words, the subjectivity, objectivity and relativity of time.

Moment: Small Part

On the occasion of the ‘rebirth’ of MSG, the duo of artists, as if they were reviving a broken watch, focused on how to simultaneously inject the bulk and essence of time into the gallery, via today/now/this moment and tomorrow.

Moment: A certain point in the course of events

In order to achieve this, an old pendulum clock in a wooden case is assigned to the main wall cell (niche) in the inner left section of the gallery. And on a part of the flooring exposed to daylight, a sundial that will variably trickle, as light, time in all its organic nature, into the gallery space.

Moment: A stage in historical progress

On the other hand, Gündüz, a computer programmer and an artist, who has conducted research on human-machine interaction, image processing and artificial intelligence throughout his career and Kiraz, a founding member of Sanat Tanımı Topluluğu/The Definition of Art Group (S.T.T.) (4), in order to represent and transmit the experience of time specifically to the perception and presence of each and every viewer, splattered digital-mechanical semblances of the same moment across all four corners of the gallery.

Moment: A stage in logical progress

To jot down an art-historical note in passing, Kiraz, in 1977, while still a student, founded this group with Şükrü Aysan, Ahmet Öktem and Avni Yamaner, and with the exhibitions they held from 1978 to 1981 the group marked the first conceptual art events in Turkey.

Moment: A stage in knowing

Likewise, the concept of process, part of the S.T.T.’s genetic outline, was also a real-time source of perception and excavation (6) of Kiraz’s exhibition titled ‘Analemma’, (5) held in 2017 at Milli Reasürans Sanat Galerisi in Istanbul, which he described as a workshop of aesthetic and conceptual becoming from the viewpoint of astronomy and space-time.

Moment: A stage in the increasing sufficiency of thought

This description of a collective moment ‘lived’ at MSG, constitutes an important source of diversity in terms of the bi-directional appearance of the experience that emerged in company with the creative contribution of New Media specialist Gündüz. Meeting at the crossroads of the past and the future in the present ‘moment’, Kiraz and Gündüz experienced the position of becoming both the composer and performer of the cosmic timber this concept comprises, in this plural process where they added interpretation and impression and even, expression and deconstruction to time.

Moment: A partial comprehension of something

This invitation to an experience at MSG, which brings the subjectivity and objectivity of time into discussion with every new viewer, in a sense, also corresponded to an appreciation of the ‘Resonance’ of time as a pendulum of universal being and nothingness. As it is known, Resonance (7) was discovered by Galileo Galilei, the Italian Renaissance genius in science, art, philosophy and engineering.

Moment: Primary element

It is now time to consistently mention, once again, the eternal ‘now’ in time, the ‘Moment’: With Gündüz, superimposing the image and the symbol, the spirit and substance of time, just like the human self and fate, Serhat Kiraz stated the following in an interview he held with Ata Gür in 1984, on the occasion of his ‘site-specific installation’ at MSG, setting us on the right path, so to speak (8): “…There, too, I had made contact prints of many photographs. The reason for this was: There is a temporal sequence when you take photographs, but that is not valid for digital cameras. When you take photographs, there are numbers on the film. Therefore, you can only speak of sequential time. You take a photograph and the next photograph can only be taken after. A photograph you take follows the one before it. When I mix up the time stamps of photographs, just like they later tried to do in ‘post-modernism’, you erase time, you turn it into timelessness. You can then look at everything, in the visual sense, as a single block. So now that, too, forms a structure like that, in itself…”

Moment: Constituent element

The collaborative exhibition titled Moment/An at MSG, brings together two individuals who perceive information as an instrument, and who, in their projects, by opposing formalism with an investigative scepticism, creative aesthetic concern and a need for narrative, test their own stance and permanence via the universal and variable criterion called ‘time’. This meeting place also becomes a reference for individuals who will become the reader, writer and narrator of their own time, space and perception in the gallery.

Moment: Tumult

In this sense, time, which keeps turning on the main wall of MSG with every single intervention open to experience, as a Gesamtkunstwerk (9), a total art-life work continuously superimposed with the physical, digital, verbal, aural and visual manifestations stirred up tumultuously by Kiraz and Gündüz, makes a fatalist, variable and evolutionary proposal to history.

Moment: A brief tantrum

The violence of the outspokenness of this total expression in the exhibition, also elevates the exhibition’s intellectual energy to a universal level. In every moment it describes itself, time, by preparing the platform both for its birth and death, creates a constant ‘Big Bang’ echo where the viewer also becomes an actor. The experience, along with reflections on the cultural genetics of MSG and the artists, becomes an open space / a location / space itself that discovers the boundaries of this sentimentality.

Moment: Temper

After all, the abundant temper of this exhibition attempt at MSG, mortal yet deadly as far as it is immortal, is nurtured from the ‘angular’ pluralistic potential the concept of the Moment conceals in its philosophical lap, as it has accompanied us until this sentence in the text with some of its appearances, restive like the second hand on a watch face.

Moment: Cycle

Finally, and in place of a beginning, jazz provides the most beautiful analogy. The wild variability produced by jazz, familiar to us in modern art, evolves towards an infinite fountain of creativity for time that is implied / imaged / destroyed in this exhibition. Thus, the knowledge, memory and fate of this experience, becomes a nonrecurring, enthusiastic occasion for the truth of every viewer’s time.

And then?

Three dots fall from the sky…

But the words of these fairy-tale numbers begin anew at every moment.

EVRİM ALTUĞ

Translation (EN): Nazım Dikbaş

References:

(1) Maçka Sanat Galerisi (arkiv.com.tr)
(2) Serhat Kiraz- 1983 – 1984 | Maçka Sanat Galerisi (MSG) (mackasanatgalerisi.com)
(3) Feniks – Vikipedi (wikipedia.org) [in Turkish]
(4) Sanat Tanımı Topluluğu The Definition of Art Group (sanattanimitoplulugu.org)
(5) Hiç bitmeyen bir sergi / yergi: Analemma (gazeteduvar.com.tr) [A never-ending exhibition / satire: Analemma (in Turkish)]
(6) Analemma – Vikipedi (wikipedia.org) [in Turkish]
(7) Rezonans (fizik) – Vikipedi (wikipedia.org) [in Turkish]
(8) Serhat Kiraz (istanbulmuseum.org)
(9) Gesamtkunstwerk – Vikipedi (wikipedia.org) [in Turkish]