Tuesday, February 12, 2008

cevdet erek's laboratory of mind and senses- in english this time on public demand

cevdet erek's a few retrospectives feels like a laboratory of mind and senses. the rhythm of this laboratory has turned the gallery space into a kind of parallel universe. one feels that SSS, Ruler -produced during residency in Cairo- and Studio evolve from each other in this universe.
a laboratory of mind and senses because image doesn't work properly without sound, it is the sound triggering thinking and making one curious about the structure behind the whole composition. cevdet already opens up his experimentation process, all his stops in the exhibition structure. doing that is he subtly trying to push his "presents" to construct their own variation secretly?
is it possible to state that rather than the golden proportion -as read in the exhibition text- it is the idea of variation which tunes his work? the tip comes from the subtitle of his recent publication SSS: variation for theme and carpet. variation evolves between visual and audio, among various media and different agents. that's why it includes more than the literal technical term of variation; the work is more about mathematical processes and various objects triggering variation. in ruler for instance variation turns from an arabic ruler to his father's ruler of life, a pair of rings on which leyla and kerim are written in kufi arabic, the rhythm formed out of leyla and kerim's repeating each other in kufi, that rhythm transferred on the lcd screen from bendir in the form of ruler. thus variation spreads over different layers, deforms the linear. on the other hand, this is the way cevdet lives together with the different culture he has been in through his own language, his own translation so to say.
a last point. thinking about all this, i have arrived to say that the terms viewing or viewer are not covering the experience of being present there in the exhibition space. i shared this with cevdet and he asked how to mean it then. being present with mind and senses, responding, thinking along the process...present, possible participant or the ones taking part? presents, we decided, as you have also read above.

ps: you can go back to turkish version of this post for exhibition images


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