Antonio Cosentino. Summer was a Beautiful Day

About

Since the 1990s, Istanbul based artist Antonio Cosentino has been interested in the subculture and architectural developments; the uncanny destructions and the metamor-phosis of the city of Istanbul. Many of Cosentino’s works look at historical events from a humorous perspective to create fictitious arrangements that fold different stories back on one another. Dazzling arrays of techniques contain larger political, historical and philosophical questions.

Influenced by the history of Berlin as a divided city, the artist imagines a wall erected in one night in the city of Istanbul—or is it somewhere else? In his speculative fiction story Summer Was a Beautiful Day, not only words but also objects, installations, drawings, paintings and a map merge to tell the narrative in chapters. Maps, urban models and small objects such as tin toys, soda bottle caps, albums that Cosentino collected during his residency at Zilberman Gallery Berlin’s artist-in-residence program in the summer of 2017, become the tools of storytelling for the narrator-protagonist. The collected materi-al, with the influence of the story, turned into artworks such as the tin 3D model Tuz (2017) or the charcoal drawing Hiro (2017).

Summer Was a Beautiful Day is accompanied by a catalogue, with an introduction by Lotte Laub and texts by the former curator of Istanbul Museum of Modern Art Çelenk Bafra and Antonio Cosentino.