Featuring x-ist artists Ansen, Burak Dak, Doğu Özgün, Gökhan Gökseven, Metin Alper Kurt, Murat Palta, and Tayfun Gülnar, the group exhibition Oh Holy Simplicity allows us to ponder the concept of duality, which lies the foundation of Apollonic and Dionysiac narratives and to study the idea of opposition through an artist’s perspective.
“Goethe says, ‘Remember that all this came from the opposition. Between absence and presence, immobility and movement… In this context, all oppositions are keys that make up existence itself. Through oppositions, the formless energy oscillating in the void became tangible and turned into an experience. This way, god could experience himself and a universe bloomed.
Without hell, even paradise is normalized, even purgatorized. Adam and Eve can consume all apples now in their boring purgatories. The Apollonic maxim ‘Know Thyself’ is reversed with Dionysos, who says, ‘Forget Thyself.’ Each Apollonic dynamic finds a Dionysiac answer and is thus neutralized. To disrupt this neutralization, Apollo needs to make new progress; this cycle goes on and on… Apollo takes another step for culture, and Dionysos draws closer mischievously. Apollo takes another stubborn step and finds an answer; this is how cultures progress. Otherwise, everything tends towards entropy; and the only way to disrupt this tendency is to make it exist through oppositions. This is why the same things leave us in peace but what makes us produce are the oppositions.”
Curated by Banu Seyhan, with Beren Boran as assistant curator, the group exhibition Oh Holy Simplicity can be visited at x-ist between September 7 and October 7.