Smiling Victims
Artist Serkan Adın presents the final clues to the coherent, critical and observant search of his production of the past few years with a new period of photo-graphic-based acrylic works assembled under the title of 'e-doll'.
Adın neither abstains from viewing his works as 'commodities' nor refrains from constructing their critique on this basis; we observe that his works are extruded physically through his topics, leaning towards a transparency accomplished through renewed and layered composition of their concepts and forms.
Into his patriarchal and male-dominated works, he has introduced the phenomenon of the female in a manner that provides new visual experiences regarding how we experience, present and possess the opposite sex as information.
The erotic bodies of young women have been, in artist Adın's words, encrypted and encrypted and again encrypted with new 'visual codes', in which we are faced with new and different positions whose very secrecy intensifies their stimulating effect.
The esthetic of the videoclip, with its policy of hidden imaging that excites the human imagination, the memory of the 'lolita' stereotype borrowed from popular culture, the seductive contact of this divine perception of intimacy that is experienced with the regarded and observed object when one is face to face with a work of art, has always been a part of the artist's field of interest.
The images of these young women, which can be described in western terms as 'White Caucassian', developed and worked over throughout the history of art, marketed as an 'innocent' dream that can be observed under particular conditions, appear before us again, but with an ironic eye to all the significant contradictions regarding how they are to be seen or consumed and understood (let us say in a semi-public area such as a gallery or in the depot or the salon or the bedroom of a collector).
In short, Serkan Adın, has embarked in his works on a critique of the sexuality and intimacy of the work of art; otherwise the female images he has taken in hand go no further than a metaphor, or a sugar-coated pill.
The latest works of the artist are also loaded with the delicious, nostalgic and erotic images of women that are the foundation of the 'baby boom'*, and that found a place for itself in the advertising sector. Playboy bunnies, servants, mini-skirts, maids, who knows, maybe secretaries - the sexual content of the visual and print media that appears before us - we emphasize - male-dominated images - consist of innuendoes directed toward the transitory nature of the 'current', the 'popular', the vulgar.
Serkan Adın approaches perception, touch and sterilization via the existing industry of erotic objects with deep-seated criticism, almost as if, by means of his art, he can spread among his 'spectators' a frightening cleanliness, engendering in them antiseptic concerns over his works.
One senses in the cleanliness present in his works a peculiar 'illness' sensed regarding the Earth, difficult to diagnose.
This creates the perception of a person who is willing to do the dirtiest work, but who works with diligence to appear spotless on the outside.
The seductiveness of Serkan Adın's works is the result of the anonymity of our complicity in the comprehension of these effigies and in our living and sharing them.
Adın's strategy in the seductiveness of his works is based on the fact that each of them is artificial - but at the same time this artificiality is 'authentic' - and so when the works come together they form a sincere alliance.
The French theorist Jean Baudrillard, in his essay of the same name, 'regarding seductiveness', notes the relationship between confrontation and seduction:
"Confrontation and seduction are very intimately related to one another. But at the same time there are certain differences between them. Confrontation is based on drawing the 'other' into an area where you are powerful. When the other is also powerful in this area, an unlimited race begins. On the other hand, the strategy of seduction is to draw the other into an area where you are weak, and the other will also be weak in this area. It is here that the issue becomes both calculated and incalculable weakness. In order to be caught by the other, confrontation is necessary..."
Serkan Adın's very strongly provocative works not only confront the spectator and his imagination, they succeed in injecting themselves with the existential ache of existence at the same moment as you, in the most sterile of manners, and then disappear before your very eyes.
These works, while being questioned as to whether or not you will regard them, will capture you, but to the extent that they are being observed, they will enjoy the peculiar potency of catching you red-handed.
This acrimonious and silent agreement between the observer and the observed seeps precisely through this sharp but fragile wound, and is written with light.
Upon leaving the exhibition, one is unable to dismiss the question of whether one is, or is not, one of the smiling victims.
* the new youthful population that experienced the sexuality and bohemian life that burgeoned in the USA after the Second World War.
Evrim Altuğ