Füsun Onur: Opus II – Fantasia / Precaution

Arter welcomes the summer with two new exhibitions. Both drawn from the Arter Collection and curated by Emre Baykal, Füsun Onur’s installation Opus II – Fantasia and the group exhibition Precaution are on view 11am – 5pm between Tuesday and Saturday.

Füsun Onur: Opus II – Fantasia 
One of the pioneers of contemporary art in Turkey, Füsun Onur’s installation Opus II – Fantasia from the Arter Collection carries references to music, as is the case with many of her works. Deploying everyday, fictional, and even autobiographical elements to explore form, space, time, and the relations among them through an exceptional variety of materials, Onur approaches music as a process that engages multiple senses. In the installation, she uses four ordinary objects as the medium and elements of music, interpreting space and time through rhythm and variations. The forms and motifs which emerge from the rhythmic appearances of and encounters between the white knitting needles, balls of gold braid, small porcelain figurines, and standard museum plinths proliferate and vary with pauses and crescendos, composing a visual music that makes reference to and rearranges the exhibition space.

Opus II – Fantasia was conceived by Füsun Onur in 2001 for the exhibition Aus der Ferne so nah [From Far Away So Close] at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden–Baden. The artist then created different rearrangements of the work for the group exhibitions Tactics of Invisibility (2011) at Arter, and Border of Time (Saum der Zeit, 2018) at Neues Museum Nürnberg.

The notions of space and time, of light and shadow, of sound and silence continue to feature in Füsun Onur’s artistic practice which has been shaped over the past half-century within the enchanting world of the house where she was born and still lives. A significant number of the works produced over different periods of the artist’s career were featured at Arter in the retrospective Through the Looking Glass (2014), an exhibition curated by Emre Baykal and accompanied by a comprehensive publication on the artist’s oeuvre. Onur is currently preparing a new work for the Pavilion of Turkey at the 59th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale which will be held in 2022.

Precaution
Artists: Hamra Abbas, Halil Altındere, Rogelio López Cuenca, Burak Delier, Lamia Joreige, Ali Kazma, Alicja Kwade, Serkan Özkaya, Walid Raad, Canan Tolon, Nasan Tur

Conceived around the relationships between the artist, the art institution, the artwork, and the viewer, Precaution focuses on practices of art production, preservation, and exhibition through the works selected from the Arter Collection. The exhibition explores the preparation and negotiation processes the audience rarely witnesses; the power dynamics shaped by cultural, ideological, hierarchical, and economic contexts; as well as the weaknesses, sensitivities, fragilities particular to the field of art. The exhibition features 13 works by 11 artists in the Arter Collection.

Presented at a time when the pace of daily life, our social relations, our modes of work, the distances between us and the world have changed, our range of movement has been limited and even our physical appearance has been masked, Precaution takes its name from Canan Tolon’s work in the exhibition and draws inspiration from the word “precaution,” heard and used so frequently across different contexts including economy, security, energy, and especially, public health today.

By way of the relationships they forge with one another and with the institutional space where they are temporarily exhibited, the works featured in this collection-based exhibition encourage us to reconsider not just the meaning of precaution, which has permeated into our everyday language and reshaped our lifestyles, but also many other concepts and phenomena that define the arena of contemporary art today: relations of production in the art and business worlds, hierarchical and bureaucratic systems, conflicts/conjunctures between the personal and the institutional, communication and negotiation, inclusion and exclusion, blockbuster exhibitions and queuing crowds, publicity, the value of the artwork, intellectual property rights, methods of preservation and conservation, security, construction and destruction, social distancing, and masks…

Both exhibitions will be on view at Arter until February 20, 2022.

Press Contact: 
Firdevs Ev Şimşek
firdevse@arter.org.tr
T +90 212 708 58 08