In Fact

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How do we re-evaluate the increasingly impossible concept of representation in the current post-truth era, through constructed identities and the perception of social identity?

Notions are defined through what “they are not” in the impasse of familiar signs and references. While the entirety of the works in the exhibit create a layered referential journey, they provide a new perspective through the elements they refer to, instead of what they are. Seventeen works take place in the exhibition aiming to re-question and revive the concept of representation today; which is analyzed since the 80s, after analogies of Simulacra and appropriation became a medium in contemporary art.

While the hollow dress titled State of Being by Chiharu Shiota, who represented the Japanese Pavillion at the previous Venice Biennale, bundles up a reality we know that exists, but is indescribable; Tracey Emin’s photograph Sometimes… questions the meanings ascribed to a concept. On one hand, Gavin Turk disrupts our definition sequence with a giant blue carpet that refers only to its creator rather than having an existence on its own; on the other hand, İhsan Oturmak probes the boundaries of enforced definitions. Bengü Karaduman portrays an ongoing yet non-completing state of being in her work titled Sketch for a New Body. Volkan Kızıltunç’s video addresses the notion of performing through the act of posing. Cindy Sherman’s works in which she questions her own identity and the imputed reality with various attires throughout her art practice greet Hale Tenger’s Self Portrait / Broken Record. Özlem Günyol’s work titled What’s for today? makes us reconsider the issue of social representation through the realities we are exposed to.