x-ist is hosting the sixth solo exhibition by Ekin Saçlıoğlu between May 14 and June 20, 2015.
Pick and Keep has four different sections named as Nummulities, New World, Antiques and Barometz respectively, the common element of all these sections is the human desire to collect, conserve and accumulate or, in other words, to build collections.
Nummulities, the first series produced for the exhibition, consist of the skeletons of fictional, hybrid creatures realized through the combination of various animal bones and the drawings that depart from these skeletons.
While the gold and silver plated bone arrangements in Nummulities become autonomous, singular sculptures, the drawings on the wall behind them are based on imagination, illustrating how these animals would have looked like if they had really lived, and often depicting them in their natural habitats.
In this section, creatures that once lived and whose bones are their only surviving element come back alive with a different creator and design, and they start living in fictional environments. It appears as if the process of life that leads to death is reversed thanks to art.
This series may also be considered to be reminiscent of the cabinets of curiosity, i.e. fairly personal collections particular to the 14th and 15th centuries that feature rare, extraordinary and strange, peculiar pieces.
Cabinets of curiosity have a very wide scope in which building a collection becomes particularly meaningful. Many things from various time periods and places, living or inanimate, natural or artificial, are among their subjects of interest. Thanks to the discovery of the new world, exotic plants and animals brought to the West from distant places, become part of these collections as well. The new world is not only conquered through territory, but with all its imagery. Explorers depart on their journeys with scientists capable of collecting animals and plants.
The exhibition continues with the second section, the New World series, composed of four canvases. The depicted exotic birds and plants appear to originate from a “paradise”, from the recently discovered corners of this new and colorful world. They reflect an exciting atmosphere where an eternally fresh, immaculate and infinite form of life continues.
The third section of the exhibition features meticulously and patiently executed monochrome drawings. Somehow in contrast to the New World series, these four drawings the artist named as Antiques series, is the spokesman for the things past and outdated.
This time, objects whose first phase of life is over, are temporarily awaiting their collectors on the shelves of antique shops, referring in a way to the fictional environments of the Nummulities in the first section, while presenting a striking contrast with the immaculate life of the New World series. Some of the objects we see in the drawings are bought by Saçlıoğlu to her own collection and presented in the exhibition. Thus the antique shop is partially carried into a different dimension of reality and the object in the drawing finds a new life. The viewer will discover at the exhibition space, which ones they are.
The fourth and the final section of the show, Barometz, consists of an installation. One of the four components of the installation is the drawing of the legendary Tatar Plant also known as the Sheep Plant, that gave the artwork its title. The second element is the cloth tree, also found in an antique shop and composed of the four legs of a hoofed animal. The artificial fur that the artist hung complements it. At the top of the installation, the colored drawing depicting the gazing eyes of a goat, a mythological animal loaded with various meanings, constitutes the third component. As the fourth element we encounter a meat-plant made of silicone, illustrating a mid-species exactly like Barometz. Neither these two mid-species, nor the unanimously made hoofed cloth tree are far from being part of a cabinet of curiosity.
The installation Barometz evolves around concepts such as nature exploited and transformed by humans for selfish reasons, mythologized nature, and conscience.
In her latest exhibition Pick and Keep, Ekin Saçlıoğlu who presents a new and different self to us in every exhibition of hers, is pursuing the cabinets of curiosity that always stand somewhere in between religion and profanity, art and nature, science and aesthetics, reason and imagination, experiment and magic, also using number '4' as the symbol of a firm standing...
"As long as collectors are the ones to select the symbols, they and only they can be the final references" Baudrillard says, and in this exhibition Saçlıoğlu's final reference is no one else but her own self.