cevdet erek - in circulation

About

neugerriemschneider is pleased to present our first solo exhibition with Cevdet Erek, opening at our Linienstrasse location for Berlin Art Week and the fall edition of Gallery Weekend Berlin. In his work, Erek engages with the broad spectrum of interfaces between tone, space, perception, reception and time, applying his extensive backgrounds as an architect, educator, musician and sound engineer and designer to rhythmically draw out parallels through site-reactive installations and sonic environments. For in circulation, the artist presents a concise group of works that reflects upon sound as lived sensation and its profound physical manifestations.

The exhibition’s trio of Daf without Skin (2021), Larger Daf without Skin (2023) and Ruler Daf without Skin (2021) originate from Erek’s extensive work as a percussionist and the resultant deeply engrained attunement to instruments, their employ and their particularities. The three in-dialogue works, developed in collaboration with instrument maker Sami Hosseini, derive their general constructions from the eponymous frame drum. Held in front of a player’s body, gently supported by their palms or thumbs, the daf gains its distinctive rustle from a series of rings that rub against or bounce off of the drum’s stretched membrane as it is manipulated or struck. Erek’s works subvert this mode of teasing tone from the instrument, and are created without drumheads: Here, they are suspended by barely visible cord, thus redefining and rebalancing the connections between action and interaction, noise and motion, or response and its prompt. Daf without Skin and its magnified counterpart, Larger Daf without Skin, retain their source’s circular form and, nearly floating, become akin to halos waiting to be donned. When at their centers, a participant becomes the focus for the uniquely encompassing impression of sound that the modified drums, when played in the space, produce. Ruler Daf without Skin is a straightened-out version of the daf’s wooden hoop that visually translates cyclical time to linear. Here the metallic adornments hang in a row, each chain discrete, acting simultaneously as percussive agents and as waypoints - markers along a cryptic scale or notes in a novel system of temporal notation.

Erek’s The Mother Ear (2023), the first figurative sculpture in a body of work characterized by sonic landscapes, built environments and the objects that may populate them, is based on a silicone-mold portrait of his mother. Rendered monochromatically, with points of reference as diverse as antique reliefs, Dadaist constructions, contemporary animatronics and dummy-head microphones, Erek’s cast bears wearable binaural microphones nestled in its ears. These audio-capture devices are intended to produce three-dimensional, perspectival experiences of sound - auditory illusions whose efficacy relies on similarity between the listener’s physical makeup and the microphones’ placement during recording. The Mother Ear’s dimensions, and thus its inaudible experience, is tailored to a specific individual, and constitutes a touching tribute. The form gently sways, dancing to a silent groove and twitching involuntarily as if by neurological reflex, its movements taken from the artist’s own mapped gestures in a fusion of portraitist and the portrayed. An adjacent listening room features a library of Erek’s new sound works, illuminating the auditory potential of The Mother Ear’s unheard soundtrack and that produced by the Daf without Skin triplet.

The artwork of Cevdet Erek (b. 1974) has been the subject of international solo exhibitions at Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum der Gegenwart, Berlin (2019); Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago (2019); Ruhrtriennale, Bochum (2019); Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp (2018); Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City (2017); Turkish Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale, Venice (2017); Spike Island Artspace, Bristol (2014); and Kunsthalle Basel, Basel (2012). He has also taken part in Manifesta 14, Pristina (2022); 7th Singapore Biennale, Singapore (2022); 11th Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai (2016); 20th Biennale of Sydney, Sydney (2016); 14th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul (2015); 5th Marrakech Biennale, Marrakesh (2014); Sharjah Biennial 11, Sharjah (2013); 7th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane (2012); and dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel (2012). Erek lives and works in Istanbul.