The Incident of Art / The Art of Incident

Artists: Ardan Özmenoğlu, Burak Eren Güler, Doruk Kumkumoğlu, Eda Soylu, Elif Boyner, Erdal İnci, Fırat Engin, Kıvanç Martaloz, Nurtaç Ulutürk, Seydi Murat Koç
 

Akbank Sanat opens the 2016–17 season with the exhibition The Incident of Art / The Art of Incident, curated by Hasan Bülent Kahraman.

The Incident of Art / The Art of Incident exhibition, showcasing the artworks of ten young artists, Elif Boyner, Fırat Engin, Burak Eren Güler, Erdal İnci, Seydi Murat Koç, Doruk Kumkumoğlu, Kıvanç Martaloz, Ardan Özmenoğlu, Eda Soylu and Nurtaç Ulutürk, will be open for viewing at Akbank Sanat between September 30–December 3, 2016.

The human being produces art. The production of art is a conscious act. Art is an extension of consciousness. Consciousness belongs to the earth. We derive our consciousness from nature. In developing it we look at objects. We derive concepts and phenomenona from objects. Finally we arrive at reality. We establish links between realities, objects, phenomenona and concepts. This is abstraction.

Art is abstraction. Existentially art can be real. But in terms of meaning and existence it is based on abstraction. It is a product of the abstracting consciousness. And in turn, it abstracts nature, the universe and finally consciousness.

The incident of art: the art abstracted by consciousness, abstracting consciousness. The consciousness before art is not the same as the consciousness after art. It has been abstracted by art.

This is an accident. The coincidence belongs to consciousness. But it is beyond consciousness. Art is an incident. This is not an outcome related to knowing/not knowing. Despite knowing and knowledge there is an incidentality in art. Because consciousness gives form to art but does not determine it. Art transcends consciousness. It leans towards the incidental.

Coincidence is not destiny. Thus, it is not metaphysical either. It is probability. It is mathematics. It is a self-generated unknown, arising from the known and the envisioned. It is spontaneity. There is no art that is not spontaneous. At most, it is the moment of decision.

But who could argue that the decision is objective? The decision is an incident, the decision is an accident.

The world of today: the world of accidents. In a universe with such extended possibilities, at a time when living is intertwined with coincidence, the idiosyncrasy of art lies in it imposing itself as, and insisting to be, a possibility.

Because the core of art is consciousness and beauty. And beauty is the unidentifiable. We only encounter it by accident. And only in that encounter do we recognise beauty. As a state of possibility!

Art is always a coincidental encounter. Because art is the moment of meeting beauty!