Proxemics

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Labirent Sanat presents the exhibition titled Proxemics which features works produced by different mediums by Aslıhan Kaplan Bayrak, Beyza Boynudelik, Emel Ülüş, Nesli Türk, Serhat Akavcı and Soyhan Baltacı, between 7 April - 28 May.

“The well-being I feel, seated in front of my fire, while bad weather rages out-of-doors, is entirely animal. A rat in its hole, a rabbit in its burrow, cows in the stable, must all feel the same contentment that I feel.” For these lines, which the painter Vlaminck wrote while living in prosperity in his quiet home, Bachelard conveys his thoughts in the fourth chapter of the Poetics of Space, the Nests: “Thus, well-being takes us back to the primitiveness of the refuge. Physically, the creature endowed with a sense of refuge, huddles up to itsself, takes a cover, hides away, lies snug, concealed.”

Our transition to the fetal state when we are in pain or danger is actually the position that every person takes to reach the sense of security like in a mother's womb, our first and ancient place. The cave, which is identified with the womb with its dark, moist and protective structure is the first human's natural refuge. In psychology cave corresponds to the inner world with its labyrinth structure. The human, who is thrown out of the cave at birth, who gets involved in social life after years, begins a struggle to exist with the limits against immensity of the universe. By experiencing the boundaries of natural environment, he creates his own invisible and physical boundaries with impulses such as protection, safety, owning and belonging, while forming an identity. Human who has a beginning, origin and a limited life bears the trace of limited nature.

The Proxemics exhibition focuses on the unspoken rules of human relations and the visible and invisible boundaries that people create with nature, living things, objects, and space. Anthropologist Edward T. Hall distinguishes between four areas determined by the distance between a person and other living things: If one paints a series of concentric rings radiating outward from oneself, the closest ring/distance would be the private space, then the personal space, the social space, and the outermost ring the public space. The width of each "ring" is determined by factors as gender, relationship, environment, society, and culture.
Hall talks about the role that spatial distances play in communication between all living things in his book "The Hidden Dimension" (1966). The way living things physically understand and communicate with the empirical world is spatial. In the same book, Hall suggested that all living things, in line with their evolutionary and cultural needs, position themselves in the center and show behavioral and affective reactions according to distance in their relations with other objects and living things in space. These borders that we create around us are permeable. It can be stretched and narrowed according to the conditions.
Consciousness is the hallmark of our existence, we would not develop it without limitations. Consciousness is an awareness that arises from the dialectical tension between possibilities and limitations. Just as every determination is also a negation, the boundary also has a double function, determining what is left in and what is left out.

But is nature a mere conglomeration of independent beings, each capable of self-isolation? Or does it consist of a flow of constantly related events and intertwined processes? Everything that we consider fixed in the universe is actually the continuities in a state of change that follow a slow rhythm or repeat with differences in a flow that we cannot sense. It is also possible to describe the universe as an interactive power field that includes environmental actors, where structures that are intricate and intertwined with their surroundings we cannot divide into precise boundaries, are in contact with their surroundings.

In this respect, the Proxemics exhibition aims to think about the visible or invisible borders that we create about the things we are in contact with, the existence, permeability and flexibility of borders, through the contrast concepts of city-nature, self-other, personal space-private space, utopia-dystopia. You can see the exhibition, which includes works by Aslıhan Kaplan Bayrak, Beyza Boynudelik, Emel Ülüş, Nesli Türk, Serhat Akavcı and Soyhan Baltacı at Labirent Sanat until 28 May 2022.