On the Road — Kezban Arca Batıbeki

Artist

Kezban Arca Batıbeki

Curator

Location

3 Whitehorse Street, London W1J 7LF, Mayfair, UK

The use of objects and images is not only limited to a visual meaning, but also carries a social, cultural and personal depth. Although the artist's work circulates in the social discourse, it always represents his own subjectivity, even privacy. The objects present the viewer with a scene of symbols and allegories, creating a grand mise-en-scene that keeps the memory of his art alive. The works address contemporary social and cultural issues from a post-modernist perspective, while touching on the gap created by modernity regarding memory and identity.

Since the beginning, the nature of photography has been baffling. Photography is science, technology, testimony, observation, magic, sense of belonging, imitation, nostalgia, expression of creativity, source of news, truth, form of art… ‍ No matter what we embrace, glorify or abrade and reject about it, is there another medium that accommodates this much variety of functions by its nature? Nevertheless, the simplicity of the photographic world could withhold the complexity of human nature and create an altered consciousness. Because the primary approach to a photograph is through the emotions. A photograph can evoke our most intense, fragile, unexpected, or ferocious reactions. We look at a photograph to see a momentary reflection of cruelty, grotesqueness, beauty, misery, love, nature, artistic creation, immoral violence. We look at a photograph to discover our instinctive reaction towards these kinds of alterities. As John Berger describes the photography as it is the proof of the existing world, it also sense-making of the world, a way of exploring the textures and wholeness that is beyond us. Kezban Arca Batıbeki, as well, employs photography, pursuant to her mythology and her unique artistic approach, as an intuitional encounter with the world. From her paintings to installations, her short movies to photography, in Batıbeki's pieces, regular images turn into symbolic icons. Photo novels, record albums, magazines, trinkets, shiny objects, glamourous outfits, elements that are prominent in her work are at the core of her artistic creation. This unique approach to her work -her aesthetics- functions as an envoi that delivers the most unexpected dept of critical intellect. Everything contemporary and popular is ordinary when they represent their basic function. Yet when they become an indicator, they become sensations. All of the objects, figures, and places on Batıbeki's work, arise as an indication of her interactions with culture and society. We are going through a period where place and time mean "now and here." Memories are reviving as our pace towards the future is put on hold. We are all experiencing a "shutdown" on a communal and personal level. These times that we are going through perhaps defines most accurately the photographic scenes created by Kezban Arca Batıbeki, hence bringing into being "The Distant Proximity." Batıbeki's photographs, which some were produced during the epidemic, reflecting on her archaeology, use the whole experience as a distinctive perspective. If Accumulating photographs are accumulating the world, the artist interprets the photographs that she has collected through the years by manipulating them with her approach and converting them into cinematographic digital collages. Nonetheless, every single image on these scenes created by the artist represents an insight of Batıbeki rather than a random lay-out. Batıbeki's journeys from New York to Bologna, St Petersburg to Paris, and Edirne to Matera are all represented in the form of a memento on her pieces. Because If a "journey" is a method of sense-making of the world, journeys of Kezban Arca Batıbeki are neither a metaphor of esoteric enlightenment nor codes that impose emotional or figurative participation. Because a person's remembrance mechanism is more of the interpretations and updates of what happened rather than what really happened. The purpose of Batıbeki's photography is paving the way of creating a direct experience of time and place, similar to the significant relationship between the place and memory or the memory and time. A peacock appearing at a crossroad, one of her signature women figures waiting in a glamorous hotel lobby or a room, dancers in a cabaret show or mysterious figures standing in the middle of a street where the time feels frozen- all images that Batıbeki provides are glimpses of the momentary glamour which leads to the reinvention of the long-forgotten moments.** Her approach gives the audience the space of freedom from a distance while establishing a solid emotional connection to a specific moment. The world of stabilized time and place created on Batıbeki's photography presents itself separately from the audience's perception. "Time" crisis of today – a constant state of being active/mobile, and imposed need of acceleration - extinguishes our capability to be at a standstill. On the other hand, reality, which is a phenomenon of time, is created by stabilizing, superimposing, and compressing events/facts/images through art. Cinematographic scenes in these hybrid compositions that allow an alternative reality in the reconstruction of reality in a plastic and symbolic context, emerging with the mediums of documentary- findings -photography and collage, present themselves as the intermediate space/time between the impressions and memories of Kezban Arca Batıbeki. In the winding paths of memory, "time" connects with an ongoing present without getting old or buried in the past. The images found on this path between the past and the future manifest themselves as temporal forms loaded with tension. Although each photograph is claimed to be a "memento mori" in a world where human beings exist as a "walker," the artist opens a path for us to discover the scent of time by gliding and traveling through the present. Derya Yücel August 2020, Istanbul

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