Gözde İlkin - 'stained estate'

About

Gözde İlkin’s solo show, “stained estate”, emerges with the artist’s testification of the renovation project of Taksim First Aid Hospital, which is located opposite to the house that the artist moved in November 2014. 

During the 4-month period that the artist was personally going through her settling process, she recorded videos and took photos of the destruction of the hospital whose history goes back to the pre-republican periods as a nursing home. With her changing perception of everyday life, the artist starts to work with anthropologist Umut Yıldırım who writes on gentrification and urban memory. 

Inspired by Umut Yıldırım’s text on Narmanlı Han titled as “Rust”, İlkin starts to think and visualize the destruction process of a metal or a plant that releases rust. Rust destroys the material and leaves a trace of absence. By focusing on the question “What is the feeling, form and material of a ruin?”, İlkin works with this trace of absence, rust, and stitches her images on to it. Instead of painting the fabric as she usually adopts in her works, the artist uses “Rust” in this exhibition to indicate the forms emerging from the concept of destruction and absence. Two videos from the destruction site are also part of this new body of work. 

She considers these construction sites that erase or “renew” the urban memory as areas having chronic pain and associates this content with Phantom Limb Syndrome where one still feels the continuing pain even after the cutting off of a limb. İlkin starts to work on the human memory and the traces of absence left by renovation and destruction of the city’s elements. 

İlkin’s recent body of work also includes works on found fabrics that relate to the concept. 
 

* Umut Yildirim’s “Rust” text published in February issue of the fanzine titled as "Gulyabani Gunlugu" will be available to read in the gallery during the exhibition.