AnonymoX

x-ist is hosting Serkan Adın's solo exhibition titled "AnonymoX" between 26 December 2013 - 25 January 2014. Below is Burcu Pelvanoğlu's text on the show.

 

As it was in his previous exhibitions "Instant Message (2005)", "Save as (2007)", "E-doll (2008)", and "Killjoy (2011)", the focal point of the latest exhibition of Serkan Adın is also female. Thus, this series is consistent with his last eight years of production and, in a sense, displays the gradual transformation of it.

 

For his exhibition titled "Instant Message", Serkan Adın had transformed the photographs, which had been created through digital manipulation, on paper using woodcut printmaking and generated a language of shapes using both traditional and technological mediums. From the title of his exhibition "Save as" from 2007, Adın's wish to emphasize this digital technique could easily be noticed. In her essay written for the exhibition catalogue, Aysun Oran was talking about how surface and figure were leaking into each other sneakingly and mingling together: "However, besides this free sphere to where spacelessness is carried, by awakening the ideas of flesh that is intertwined with itself, the body and therefore eroticism, the color of ‘skin' -which is used persistently- and the image of woman condition every viewer to evaluate the picture at least from the same starting point. With the help of this stylistic equipment, a story, which is already existent in the viewer's mind, is being tried to be examined under "Save as". While the belonging of female figure makes one to question the well-known imaginary associations, habituated emotional depredations, and meanings attached to female form, using a ground or platform where the figure was made stand, the female figure is being materialized."

 

We can see that Serkan Adın was searching for a similar effect in his exhibition "E-doll" from 2008. In her essay "Smiling Victims" which was written for this exhibition, Evrim Altuğ was mentioning that Adın offers new visual experiences on how we experience, present, and turn woman - the opposite sex - into information in art and emphasizing that the erotic bodies of women are being encoded again and again with new ‘visual codes' which in turn consolidates their effect of incitement.

 

In this new exhibition of Adın, we are again left tête-à-tête with young women in leading roles and the codes regarding the opposite sex. Although Serkan Adın's works can be thought as pictures that are made using hyperreal tehchiques, this is a huge fallacy. The only part of Adın's production that intersects hyperrealism, in Baudrillard's words, is the transformation of medium into the allegory of death while it is being reproduced via photography; the fact that because the reality is covered by layers of simulation, it is almost impossible to reach it through these layers. Thus, in order to decipher the coded in Serkan Adın's pictures, one should first decipher his technique. Serkan Adın, who sometimes includes premade images and other times takes a story in his mind or a film character as a starting point, pays special attention for bundling the areas of color following his interventions on images. Then he prepares charts for all colors, has prints on threaders, and cuts pieces of plexi, PVC, or nylon canvas that suit the threaders and places those on threaders. In the process of painting, he uses insulin injectors and with the help of chemical resin binders, he seperates the layers of color from one another.

 

In his works where the layers of color are separated from one another, or in his works (such as in Militar-x-ist), even the surfaces of which are separated from one another, Serkan Adın calls viewer's attention  not only on the female, but "on the eye that watching her" through the sensation of space (in-between spaces) that he creates. Although the figure in "Babysitter" who directly interacts with the viewer or with "the eye that is watching her", looks like she is trying to steer clear of such a relationship in "Militar-x-ist" and "Ottomanslap", she keeps pointing out this other eye. On the other hand, In "Gummy Style'', Adın places a background covered with gummy candies on a mirror and enables the viewer to realize the existance of this eye. In one sense, the viewer compulsorily faces the moment of staring the female left with the necessity of catching his/her look by him/herself. In "Tag me!", the viewer initiates the same relationship using the magnet pins and through the pin that s/he picks, s/he realizes the slips in the meaning. In Serkan Adın's productions, it is also possible to catch the referrals associated with the history of art. In those pictures, as seen in "Crime Scene", it is probable to encounter with a Virgin Mary icon or the traces of the 19th century photography.

 

In all pictures of Serkan Adın, it is possible to mention an eye that spreads to the space of the picture and to tell a lot of things about it: a culture that materializes the femininity, but also capitalize on it, a patriarchal culture that describes women only through the norms it specified, a religious culture that is afraid of women and takes guard against them in result of this fear… This list can get longer and longer, but what is important is the type of filters that Serkan Adın uses to filter this societal perspective. Adın, who generates his figures using various techniques, brings different perspectives together and fuse them into one just like he does in his technique. This is why it is likely to see the graphic language, the styles of perception associated with female, and the origins of them. The women of Serkan Adın describe an in-between space that is between attraction and fear, just like our societal point of view.

 

Burcu PELVANOĞLU

 

Assistant Professor
Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University
Faculty of Science and Letters
Department of History of Art