SENA BAŞÖZ

A Consolation

September 12th-October 31st, 2020

KRANK ART Gallery, Istanbul

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The title of the exhibition, A Consolation, is derived from Cicero’s lost philosophical work Consolatio, written to ease his grief following the death of his daughter. Başöz grapples with the tension of narrating personal archives that don’t fit neatly into institutional frameworks.

 

The video installation that gives the exhibition its name, A Consolation, is placed on the floor of the space. During her work with the Hrant Dink Archive for the creation of the 23,5 Hrant Dink Memory Site, Başöz revisited her own personal archive of photographs, writings, and printed materials. In this process, she questioned the future of accumulated personal stories and knowledge—those that leak through the linear narratives of human lives and elude institutional structures. A looping video of Posidonia oceanica, a seaweed native to the Mediterranean, is displayed next to a pile of shredded materials from her own archive. The seaweed formally mirrors the shredded archive. Can the underwater meadow offer a consolation for the lost, the destroyed, or the forgotten in a morass of information? The artist reflects on cycles of knowledge and memory through the seaweed that sway collectively in an underwater meadow before drifting away, eventually forming piles on beaches, and then turning into compost.

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Next to this installation, on the wall, is a series of four collages on paper titled Postcards for the Future. These postcards, made from shredded photographs of sunrises and sunsets from the artist's personal archive, bird feathers, human hair, and dried seaweed, are the artist’s notes to the future. These materials initially exist within a multitude and continually disperse. In using the medium of the postcard as archival material, Başöz raises the question: Can these fragmented pieces be reactivated as parts of a whole?

 

The Aviation Series consists of cubes made from bird feathers of varying sizes. The artist has long been drawn to the form of the cube as a metaphor for the rational mind. The cube is the most efficient shape for organizing and preserving objects, reflecting the human impulse to tidy, categorize, and simplify the complexities of the universe. These feather cubes propose a reconciliation between nature’s fluidity and human rationality.

 

Family Album features two reversed photographs layered on top of each other to create the illusion of a 3D cube. Like the cubes in The Aviation Series, these also address the artist’s preoccupation with the cube as a structure for order and preservation. In this piece, the cube challenges the capacity of the photograph to hold and preserve memories, questioning the limits of archival material.

 

This Used to be Sea is a collage composed of a vintage postcard of ruins from Denizli, the artist’s hometown, placed on dried seaweed. The Moon combines shredded photographs soaked in water with dried seaweed. Both works delve into the ongoing disintegration of the world and the cycles of renewal that follow.

 

The Box is a video sequence in which various objects are concealed within thick, dark, long hair, intermittently picked over by a male or female hand. In this piece, compassion and care evoke contrasting phenomena such as concealment and revelation, holding on and letting go, death and life.