Banu Cennetoğlu / In Practice: Other Objects

SculptureCenter is pleased to announce Banu Cennetoğlu, the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States, and In Practice: Other Objects, an exhibition presented through SculptureCenter’s open call commissioning program for emerging artists.

Banu Cennetoğlu
In her wide ranging cross-disciplinary practice, Banu Cennetoğlu uses objects, images, texts, and printed matter to continuously scrutinize, contemplate, and question the position of the artist/individual vis-à-vis and within the complex geopolitical conditions of our time.

Cennetoğlu’s exhibition at SculptureCenter—her first in a U.S. institution—includes a moving image work that presents the totality of the artist’s visual archive from June 10, 2006 to March 21, 2018. The film comprises 128 hours and 22 minutes of still images and videos sourced from various devices in an unedited stream of content. Cennetoğlu refers to the work as an “introspective” that brings together scattered, fleeting moments of a life lived, from the birth of her daughter to moments of political upheaval and protest; documentation of her artistic practice; to banal footage of everyday life. The exhibition also gathers for the first time the complete 142 volumes of Cennetoğlu’s newspaper projects to date, for which the artist collects and binds a compilation of all newspapers published in a country on a single day. By tying together personal and public archives, Cennetoğlu’s work not only reinforces the maxim that the personal is political, but insists that it is also and inevitably the other way around.

Publication support for Banu Cennetoğlu is provided by SAHA, saha.org.tr. Additional in-kind exhibition support is provided by Genelec. Banu Cennetoğlu is curated by Sohrab Mohebbi, Curator, with Kyle Dancewicz, Director of Exhibitions and Programs. The exhibition is accompanied by a color publication with a joint contribution by Sohrab Mohebbi and Thomas Keenan, Director of the Human Rights Project at Bard College.

Related Programming:
SC Conversations: Banu Cennetoğlu and Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
Wednesday, January 23, 2019, 7pm

SC Conversations: Alexandra Délano Alonso, Thomas Keenan, Sohrab Mohebbi, and Benjamin Nienass
Thursday, February 21, 2019, 7pm

In Practice: Other Objects
In Practice: Other Objects presents new work by eleven artists and artist teams that probes the slippages and interplay between objecthood and personhood. From personal belongings to material evidence, sites of memory, and revisionist fantasies, the artists in the exhibition highlight curious and ecstatic moments in which a body becomes a thing or a thing stands in for a body. Rather than understanding the body as a stable figure or coherent whole, Other Objects proposes the body, and therefore the person, as a fluid and fragmentary medium—one materially contingent upon the objects with which it shares space.

The exhibition features newly commissioned works by Natalie Ball, Takming Chuang, Niloufar Emamifar, LaMont Hamilton, Ariel René Jackson, Katherine Simóne Reynolds, Aliza Shvarts, Rosa Sijben and David Bernstein, Sara Stern, Kenneth Tam, and Kiyan Williams.

The In Practice program is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts and The Pollock-Krasner Foundation. In Practice: Other Objects is curated by SculptureCenter’s 2019 Curatorial Fellow Gee Wesley and is accompanied by a color publication.


About SculptureCenter
SculptureCenter leads the conversation on contemporary art by supporting artistic innovation and independent thought highlighting sculpture’s specific potential to change the way we engage with the world. Positioning artists’ work in larger cultural, historical, and aesthetic contexts, SculptureCenter discerns and interprets emerging ideas. Founded by artists in 1928, SculptureCenter provides an international forum that connects artists and audiences by presenting exhibitions, commissioning new work, and generating scholarship.

Lead underwriting support of SculptureCenter’s Exhibition Fund has been generously provided by the Kraus Family Foundation with major support by Robert Soros, and Stephanie and Tim Ingrassia.

SculptureCenter’s programs and operating support is provided by the Lambent Foundation Fund of Tides Foundation; public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; the National Endowment for the Arts; Danielle and Drew Anderman; Andreas Beroutsos and Abigail Hirschhorn; Irene and Allen Brill; Laren C. and Jesse M. Brill; Lee and Robert K. Elliott; Elizabeth and Adrian Ellis; Charlotte Feng Ford; Fred Wilson; the A. Woodner Fund; New York City Council Member Jimmy Van Bramer; and contributions from our Board of Trustees and Director’s Circle. Additional funding is provided by the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation and contributions from many generous individuals.

For more information, please visit www.sculpture-center.org.