ARSLAN SÜKAN

http://artforum.com/archive/id=43418

http://www.flashartonline.com/interno.php?pagina=onweb_det&id_art=1177&det=ok&articolo=ARSLAN-S%C3%9CKAN---%22INtheVISIBLE%22

http://www.abitare.it/en/fotografia-e-video/arslan-sukan-inthevisible/

http://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/armchair-traveler-11012013

Whitewall | Review by Charlotte Kinberger

https://whitewallmag.com/art/the-surprisingly-celestial-while-you-are-surfing

Artnews | Review by Barbara Pollack

the creators project | Review by Becky Chung

http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/magnified-smudges-turn-smartphone-screens-into-art

Postmatter | Review by Louise Benson

http://postmatter.com/currents/surf-and-swipe/#/

http://www.anothermag.com/current/view/2986/Arslan_S%C3%BCkans_INtheVISIBLE

http://www.anothermag.com/current/view/2986/Arslan_S%C3%BCkans_INtheVISIBLE

Harpers Bazaar ART, Latin America | Feature story

Arslan Sukan 'Distorted Realities' by Anna Zilzsberger

‘Space is never empty: it always embodies a meaning.’Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 1974

In his influential series of essays The White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (1976), Brian O’Doherty points out that ‘the installation shot is a metaphor for the gallery space… in it an ideal is fulfilled as strongly as in a Salon painting in the 1830s.’ According to O’Doherty, like the Salon, the gallery can be regarded as a definition appropriate for the aesthetics of its period. It is a place with walls covered in pictures, with the wall itself having no intrinsic aesthetic. However nowadays, being a participator rather than a passive support for the art, the wall has become the locus of various ideologies, rich with a substance that it subtly donates to the art.

In his latest body of works, Turkish artist Arslan Sukan appropriates images of installation shots from the Internet, exhibition spaces within museums, galleries and art institutions around the world, changing these spaces by means of digital image processing. First he eliminates all exhibited works, emptying the rooms, so to speak. He then changes the walls, the ceiling, the floor while leaving some elements of the room exactly as they were. In some images, he chooses to make only very minimal interventions, only changing the color of one wall, for example.

In other images, however, Sükan intervenes significantly, combining different views of various architectural elements and thus almost completely rebuilding the architecture of the room. In the process, he develops three different images from each photograph: the wide angle, providing an overview of almost the entire room; the medium angle, drawing attention to a particular corner, and the close-up, only showing very specific details. On the basis of this system, in her essay on Sükan’s work displayed at Haus Konstruktiv in Zurich, curator Dorothea Strauss states that the artist manages ‘to get his photographs to come across almost like a series of investigations – investigating the possibility of a present absence.’ The artist further enhances this impression by choosing very differently sized formats; small and large image formats come together to create an ‘installational’ overall impression.

Arslan’s work calls into question the parameters of the exhibition space (both material and immaterial), challenging its guiding logic and the power it exerts on the artist or artwork. This greatly exemplifies the productive affinity between typological analysis and the built environment, satiated as it is with cultural signifiers and the trappings of social norms, power, and control that go into its construction and use. By appropriating images of gallery spaces around found on the internet and recontextualizing them- after digital manipulation – on to gallery walls, he raises questions of authorship, image meaning, visibility and invisibility in social and phenomenological terms and a hierarchical relationship between the viewer and the viewed surface.

Considering Arslan Sükan’s background in architecture and his stated interest in the intellectual dimension of architecture and man-made structures, one could say that the absence of objects, in this case, first objectified the architectural space and design details, and then shifted the viewers’ attention to their own preconceptions of what an exhbition should look like. By emptying out the exhibition space, Sükan reveals its architecture’s gaze turns in on itself with the anticipation of internal collapse. There is a place between permanence and temporality inherent in architecture; once built, it is always in the process of deterioration until its ultimate collapse, leaving space for new building.

As Dorothea Strauss puts it, Sükan ‘orchestrates a new proto-space, so to speak, in which (conceptually speaking) everything has already been shown and everything will be shown in the future. Past and future combine to form a visible invisibility.’ The artist’s manipulated images sensitize the audience to the constructed nature of the exhibition space, which produces cultural signifiers in the form of artworks, claiming to form our identity, and invite a re-examination of conventional signifiers of beauty. Presenting such empty space to the viewer is a concept first adapted by Yves Klein in his emblematic exhibition ‘Le Vide’ at the Iris Clert gallery in 1958. This event marked a crucial stage in the history of modern art, transforming the empty space into an exhibited object, which would be radically repeated and remade in other contexts. Such gestures would go on to instigate a questioning of the historical, institutional, and social framework of the ‘white cube’, challenging its claim to neutrality. As such, Arslan Sükan’s ‘empty spaces are, in fact, not truly empty. By digitally painting walls of such seemingly empty spaces, laying bare their impact on the artworks that they are exhibiting. While it seems as though he is creating a process of removal, what these techniques create is a layering of (digital) paint, which he states demonstrates ‘how a space shapes… the artwork… showing (visualizing) invisible things in our life.’ This fact can only be identified at closer inspection or through the description of the work, questioning and challenging the perception of the viewer, and thus adding to the discourse about the reality of the image.

In his early work, in a series of photographs titled ‘While you are sleeping’ Sükan already stated experimenting with similar concepts of the unknown, bringing in another layer to his work: the Uncanny. The Freudian Uncanny is the unfamiliar familiar, the conventional made suspect. But the Uncanny is not simply an experience of strangeness or alienation. It can take the form of something familiar unexpectedly arising in a strange and unfamiliar context or vice versa. In such a way, the compositions in Sükan’s photographs are metamorphosed and warped into spaces of uncannies, where perspective and dimensions are perverted to make things that once may have seemed natural, now unfamiliar, with the viewer becoming uncertain of their place in concrete reality. By digitally rendering his photographs, Sükan creates artificial constructions of reality, which can be seen as a comment on the shifting technological realities and perspectives of contemporary society. In ‘Now here to now here’, a multitude of boats are plying the sea by night, without a specific direction and in the light of a double moon. In this series of photographs, the element of time seems to be removed. By digitally manipulating his ‘seascapes’ he creates uncertainty in the viewer, questioning the idea of photography as a medium to capture moments in time. This uncertainty and confusion is heightened by his play with dimensions, perspective and distance, confusing the eye with a great level of darkness, making the world look alien and unrecognizable.

In such ways, Arslan explores the meaning of the representation of an image: the dualism that arises between the constructed and existing, perception and realistic representation of the world, space and time. Sükan’s approach in this series of works relates to a statement made by Jean Baudrillard in his work The Evil Demon of Images saying that ‘ the image is interesting not only in its role as reflection, mirror, representation of, or counterpart to, the real, but also when it begins to contaminate reality and to model it, when it only conforms to reality the better to distort it, or better still: when it appropriates reality for its own ends, when it anticipates it to the point that the real no longer has time to be produced as such.’

Sükan’s works thus also challenge the value of photography itself, the reliability of its representation of reality, or the image of reality, exploring how photography both documents and manipulates it. He states: ‘ I am very much intertesed in the construction of concepts that try to show the objective reasons in subjective points of life… an unknown situation often stimulates speculation and uncertainty. This is one of the reasons I try to explore the thems of condition, duality, representation, perception and context in general.’ By omitting the human figure from his images he indirectly analyses the patterns of human life and stretches the traces of human impact in his works, leaving them open to viewer’s own personal interpretation. In the creation of his images, he expresses all his own intimate reflections on photography, experiencing first hand the relationship between the chosen objects and the absent subjects.

Digitally manipulated photography and the appropriation of images taken from the Internet are both very recent forms of art production in our current age of information and technology. In his essay Postproduction, French writer and curator Nicolas Bourriaud states: “ What we usually call reality is a montage. But is the one we live in the only possible one? From the same material(the everyday), we can produce different versions of reality.” The realm of new media influencing our ‘reality’ continues to be an area where new forms or structures are created. Nevertheless, neutral and transparent photographic or filmic ‘documentation’ is a form of mediation – one of the principal ways in which we codify and construct reality. The artwork is no longer an end point but a simple moment in an infinite chain of contributions. If, as stated in the beginning of this essay, the installation shot is a metaphor for the gallery space, Arslan Sükan’s works – with the little reality left in them – can be seen as a metaphor for the uncertainty of our personal realities.

http://issuu.com/artunlimited_tr/docs/au_23

http://issuu.com/artunlimited_tr/docs/au_23

http://www.vogue.it/uomo-vogue/news/2013/09/sukan

http://anotherartblog.com/?attachment_id=1982

http://warholamagazine.com/?page_id=2