Which Sun Gazed Down on Your Last Dream?
- Submitting institution
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Middlesex University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 1017
- Type
- M - Exhibition
- Venue(s)
- Rampa Gallery, Istanbul, Turkey
- Open access status
- -
- Month of first exhibition
- March
- Year of first exhibition
- 2016
- URL
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http://eprints.mdx.ac.uk/23125/
- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- ‘Which sun gazed down on your last dream?’ a multidisciplinary solo exhibition at RAMPA Gallery, Istanbul, aspires to deconstruct the above question and reflect on the notions of in-betweenness, liminality and historicity. Over the years many of my immersive video installations, spatial anamorphic drawings and sculptures presented concepts on mobility, migration of people, objects, and ideas. Which sun gazed down on your last dream? is a question which Charles Baudelaire posits in his book ‘On Wine and Hashish’ (1860), a pivotal work on the vivacity of inebriation and its ability to generate creative impulses. The orchestration of the works borrows from the surrealist approach to “objective chance”, but at a closer inspection there is a considered relationship between all unstable elements in the exhibition. Stemming from my scholarly interests, the exhibition presents a response to the surrealist legacy and the acknowledgment of its literary and socio-political roots. There is a clear correlation between the fields of ethnography, anthropology and the Surrealism’s ability to “stimulate change”, not through theorization, but “experimentations”, and “the contrast generated by a continuous play of the familiar and the strange” (Clifford, 1988, p.121).
A Duchampian ideology runs throughout, which is constructed by semantic and visual components that include large-scale video installations, bronze and polyurethane sculptures, wall texts, paintings and photographs. For example, the large sculpture ‘Percé Rock’, reflects on ideas of natural precision and nature-made art as proposed by André Breton in his book ‘Arcanum 17’ (1944). The fragmentation is ostensible, as the conceptual framework is situated in the interconnectedness and continuity of processes and thoughts regardless of the chosen medium. The exhibition is constructed essentially in the surrealist principle by “the coupling of two realities, irreconcilable in appearance, upon a plane that apparently does not suit them” (Ernst, 1948, p.13).
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -