RITUAL

RITUAL
Emin Mete Erdoğan / Hacer Kıroğlu / Kaan Fıçıcı

Events that create transition points in everyday life and thye cyclic nature of living have been transformed into ritualistic acts through gestures, icons, images and objects. The exhibition "Ritual" explores the relationships between the plurality of cultural codes, the construction of symbolic reality, rituals as instruments for collective identities, and art as a ritual of creative action to build a meditative experience area that is based on repetition, pattern and motion, and is conveyed through symbolic images.

Emin Mete Erdoğan's sculpture “Sun Mother” and painting “Earth and Sky” focus on the change and transformation of the sacred through time. In the history of mythology, it is quite common that feminine deities of old are later turned into masculine forms by the dominant ideology. Also common is the demotion of a goddess to an angel. This piece depicts a harpy holding a sunflower, the representation of the Sun. Sun has always been a major symbol for shamanism, paganism and theism throughout history. Who holds the Sun, holds the power. The artists creates an area of interaction among ancient thought systems that surpass their subjective contexts and reproduce greater meaning.

Working on repetition in the practice of art, similarity and dissimilitude in repetition, and sound, rhythm and tracks as a function of action, Hacer Kıroğlu is influenced by carpet-weaving in Anatolia when she creates surfaces made of rhythmic sketchings. Her “Kilim” is the re-production of a carpet that was woven in 19th century İçel, where motifs of dragons, ram horns, bestial footprints, evil eyes, houndstooth and birds come together to protect life. The intrinsic rhythm and geometric genius of nomadic arts, the strong connotations of motifs used in weaving, and the ritualistic nature of the sound, movement and concentration found in the act of weaving are the results of the artist's quest for a common language.

 Kaan Fıçıcı's painting “The Ritology Series: Unnamed” creates associations between the concepts of ritual in ancient communities and the society of the present day, studying the available data in the form of an ethnographic inventory. The artist uses the axiometric language of the mandala, the fictional images of ritual depictions, and images that belong to different periods of time to produce heterotopical ritualistic settings. The construction of these settings like stages alludes to game theories, which is the sociological equivalent of continuing social dynamics through rituals.