ELGİZ MUSEUM TAKES VIDEO ART IN THE FOCUS ON ITS 20TH ANNIVERSARY!

“Contemporary art is an expression of a society's cultural heritage from its past and its bright face looking forward” – Dr. Can Elgiz

Turkey's first contemporary art museum was founded in 2001 by collectors Sevda and Can Elgiz, with the foresight that it needs a space for contemporary art productions to meet the audience. Continuing to support the projects of young artists and curators under the name of Proje 4L Istanbul Contemporary Art Museum yesterday, and today as Elgiz Museum, the institution continues to share its current production and accumulation of national and international contemporary art with art lovers, in addition to its twenty years of experience. .

Elgiz Museum, which has an important role in the development of many art mediums such as performance and video art in Turkey, and the young artists of the period it was founded in today's production in the international arena, focuses on video art in its 20th anniversary: He revisits the video works he showed in 2017. Three separate video works of Gülsün Karamustafa, Hale Tenger and Fikret Atay, who met with a wide audience in Istanbul at that time with the exhibitions Settlement (2001), Look Again (2002) and I'm So Sorry To Kill You (2003), recreated with the visual narrative of that period. engages the audience.

The exhibition Settling Down, which started the story of Proje 4L in 2001 and made a lot of noise in the press at that time, was curated by Vasıf Kortun to present a selection of artists from and within the Turkish context. Based on the location of the exhibition between the business towers district of 4th Levent and the neighborhoods right behind it, Karamustafa, who addressed the questioning of interior-exterior and private space-public space from the perspective of gender, shot 3 black-and-white videos under the direction of Atıf Yılmaz. . In the artist's installation titled "Men's Crying", videos of Fikret Hakan, Ekrem Bora and Cüneyt Arkın crying appeared on three separate walls. This work, which is one of Karamustafa's early video works, which opened her first solo exhibition in 1978, will meet the audience again in Elgiz Museum in Turkey after being shown in many countries such as Germany, Spain and Japan.

Bringing together artists from Istanbul, London, Amsterdam, Izmir, Ankara and Diyarbakir in 2002 and curated by Kortun, Look Again, the audience should look again, but where? What does a work end, what does it begin? asked questions. With these questions in mind, we watched slowed and repeated circus scenes in Tenger's 5-monitor video installation, which has been working on social memory since its first exhibition in 1990. Based on the exhibition's premise that "To look again is to make a new and different meaning behind what we look at", we look again at the artist's work called "Circulation" and the distress, control and violence in those scenes.

Curated by Halil Altındere in 2003, I'm So Sorry to Kill You exhibition introduced many young artists from different regions of Turkey to the contemporary art world of Istanbul. Atay was included in the exhibition from Batman at that time, with his video about a geography where the concepts of play and war are intertwined with the images of children shooting at each other on the train tracks with toy guns. Today, we return to this exhibition, which is the starting point of the artist's journey to the Tate Modern. While the artist, whose works have been included in important collections in many countries such as England, France and Spain, continues to live and produce in Sweden, we have the opportunity to watch his work "Bang Bang" again at the Elgiz Museum.

From PROJECT 4L, organized in parallel with the SENKRON “Simultaneous Video Exhibitions”, which will be held for the first time in Turkey, with the participation of Elgiz Museum, Bilsart, Mixer and Versus Art Project, with the contributions of Technology Sponsor Arçelik, April 15 – May 15 meets the audience at the Elgiz Museum.