Wednesday, September 12, 2007

From the catalogue

Window

All the works that the artist produces lately is dominated by the following creative fore-sentence, as a new loop...


"To produce artistic structure/form from daily activities and to intend to question references of traditional art on this basis."

Artistic activity starts from the documentation of a specific house, glass doors opening to the balcony, with the interior it frames, with the objects and the subjects, with the composed wall and the window in it, at 48 different times, in 48 different lights, the things it contains, reflects, implies, recalls.

The original work is composed of 48 details as shown-chosen in the structure.


48 "window" images are ones more divided into 48 equal parts and the chosen parts are applied on canvas in acrylic.


From the notebook of the production process


... The curtains are drawn, the bird cage put out in the sun, breathing a cool summer day.


... The shadow of the antenna is dividing the wall exactly the way I wanted in the late afternoon light.


... Night, I wanted all the objects that are seen in the light of the interior, especially the emptiness with no human beings.


... One has to pursue the plastic experience that by no means decodes the room-space; so that, -even though people are not accustomed to see their houses across- if the subjects of the room-space ever encounter with artistic activities, a probable familiarity should not cause any reaction.

...45 minutes before the sunrise: The most hidden, the most birth-like experience, the most satturated, the most evenly spread light.


Hakan Akçura


Photo: Nedim Malçuk (below), Yeşim Bilge (bottom)



About

"The digital canon at this point was one of a certain formal elegance coupled with spatial uncertainty. In Pencere/Window (1995), Hakan Akçura (Turkey) used 48 photographic images of windows documented at different times in different light. Then a computer generated an image of the final work, that was applied in acrylic paint on canvas. The familiarity of a personal room, a private flat or living quarters, was destroyed with the creation of an average space. It is at once vaguely strange and yet recognisable, like a rearrangment of old furniture."

Strangely normal (digital art in the Istanbul Biennial) / Charlotte Bydler


(She is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Art History at Uppsala University in Sweden and an art critic at Aftonbladet. At present she is working on her thesis, focusing on the internationalization of contemporary art.)

Process

48 images of "Windows" documented in different lights and different times

Computer generated image of the final work

Window (final work)

Window, acrylic on 48 canvases, 520 x 300 cm., 1995