Join us on Friday, Jan. 20, from 6 pm onwards, for a presentation at the ChertLüdde bookstore devoted to publications by Zora Mann and Gizem Karakaş.
The evening combines the works of the two artists through their aesthetic articulation of the complexity of the emotional and interior spheres.
On the occasion of the closing of Zora Mann's exhibition Nectar Hive, the artist invites us to a reading of her text, The Daughter of the Easter Egg, published in 2017. In this text, Mann transports us to a pivotal moment in her life, in which, as a result of inner shifts, she finds herself at the door with a psychiatric exploration of her emotive sphere.
The evening then shifts to a compelling personal reading of emotions and feelings, guided by Gizem Karakaş's cards, cards for playing or fortune telling, combining sensations and pictures, collected in an artistic edition under the name of Timeserving Cards.
About the books:
The Daughter of the Easter Egg
By Zora Mann
Published by ChertLüdde and Motto Books
Printed by Szaransky Productions
Designed by bruno — Giacomo Covacich
The Daughter of the Easter Egg is published in paperback format. The middle of the book holds a short text, while the rest of the pages are blank. Originally published for the artist’s installation in Art Basel Statements in 2017, the book was deliberately left almost empty to form a shell-like boundary of blank pages around Mann’s autobiographical text. Drawn from Mann’s rich life experience, the book documents the latter period of the artist’s modeling career and how her drug use sparked an episode of psychosis.
Zamane Kartları / Timeserving Cards
By Gizem Karakaş
Published by Onagöre, limited edition of 100
English
Contains 80 cards, 8 x 11 cm
These photographs capture moments of feeling, thinking and trying to make sense of the world whilst looking at a body of water or a bunch of stones, gazing at the ground or the air, or even when staring at an armchair. Keeping track of the past, not forgetting anything, and hence attempting to save everything must be a concern of yours too, like everybody else. When you decide to move forward and not look back, with the desire to let go of the past, you realize that your brain can only perceive time in a linear way and is incapable of thinking of the future independently of the past; imagining the future is actually a form of nostalgia. While looking at the photos in your archive, you might find consolation in focusing on how they make you feel today, rather than trying to reach back to the moment they were taken. After all, today is closer to tomorrow than yesterday. As you update these photos with your fresh feelings taking shape in the current moment, you realize that what loosens the tension between the past and the future is the present: it’s your perception of the now. The past and the future are just stories you tell yourself at this very instant. Everything that happens at the moment is temporary, no feeling is final. Timeserving Cards are dedicated to Today, which provides you with clarity in the cycle of time, and allows you to tell stories that change and transform every day.
About the Authors:
Zora Star Cahusac Mann was born in 1979 in the UK and spent her childhood shifting between Europe, Africa, and America.
She attended art school at Villa Arson in Nice, France, where she developed her distinct, hypersaturated artistic voice. Mann’s identifiable aesthetic ventures into the realms of disparate experiences and scores of interests. Her vibrating, psychedelic expression finds influence in folklore, geometry, dreamlike shifts, vibrant, affective color palettes, and surreal repetition that moves in relation to so many other competing movements. Leaning into psychic change, memory, and visceral registers of emotion, Mann explodes in color onto canvases, sculptures, etchings, murals, ceramics, and shields. Shields and talisman for Mann, is an incantation of therapeutic mitigation, porous membranes exploring the tender machinations of healing. Theoretical musings on fragmentation and the philosophical ticks of psychology, science fiction, literature, and natural structures, show up in bold, inquisitive creative displacement. Fractures and aesthetic bursts allude to states of mind that invite the cooperation of the involute unconscious, and she enters this risky zone with equal trepidation and innovative confidence. Mann’s hallucinogenic manifestations pulsate and throb, challenging us to drift in and out of the incorporeal in kaleidoscopic mutation.
Gizem Karakaş (b. 1987, Ankara) is an artist and cultural worker based in Istanbul.
In her practice, she focuses on the struggles, ironies, comedy, and poetry of everyday life with semi-fictional narratives of an individual becoming, navigating interpersonal and context-based relationships. Her photo, video, sound, performance, and text-based works explore the concept of sincerity in relationships through the ambiguous areas that are left between the intimate and the public, reality and fiction, art and life.
Considering the value of art through the relationships established around it, putting friendship at the center of art production, exploring collaborative working methods are central to Karakaş’ artistic approach. Hence relationships is not only a concept that she explores through her works but also an attitude / a gesture / a method that she has adopted as a creation process.
She is a member of the collectives, HAH since 2017 and Medyartiz since 2011. She is one of the faces of Hayırlı Evlat since 2017.
She is currently the Cultural Activities Coordinator in Saint-Joseph French High School in Istanbul.
