İşler Değişti
Change of Plans
5 March - 9 April 2022
Artists: Ekin Çekiç, Ali Beşikçi, Melike Koçak, Bade Turgut, Bartu Kaan Özdişçi, Kıvılcım S. Güngörün, Berk Kır, Lina İrem Arditty, Anı Ekin Özdemir, Cansu Yıldıran, Bora Şekerci, Çağla Demirbaş
Curator: Cemre Yeşil Gönenli
All of the essentials are preserved; even things that seem completely forgotten are present somehow and somewhere, and have merely been buried and made inaccessible to the subject.
Melanie Klein
Mixer is pleased to present the exhibition İşler Değişti / Change of Plans, curated by Cemre Yeşil Gönenli, as the third edition of the LENS series, which started in 2019 and this year it focuses on photography, featuring the works of 12 young artists.
İşler Değişti / Change of Plans curated by Cemre Yeşil Gönenli, brings together the works of 12 young artists around the theme of post-pandemic blues. The photography exhibition addressing the changing and transforming social psychological state and its aftermath on the younger generation in the post-pandemic world, is opening on 5th of March 2022 in Mixer. İşler Değişti / Change of Plans meditates on the speed and sorrow of the current post-apocalyptic yet ordinary era, which we abruptly found ourselves unable to hug each other, to be identified via QR codes at each door, terrified by death and loss rooted in a dark and unfamiliar anxiety, and perhaps in which we all survived by drowning in ourselves.
The exhibition, far from documenting the environmental aftermath of the pandemic, tries to understand the psychological and emotional dynamics of the outbreak through the notions of unexpected and sudden decisions, failed plans, isolation, future anxiety, and obscurity.
The exhibition re-contextualizes the artists’ independent visual bodies of work produced during the pandemic within this curatorial framework and it aims to create a collective narrative while inviting the viewer to question where they stand in and how big of a part they play in this collective memory. Bringing together the works of artists residing in and outside of Turkey from the same generation, the exhibition echoes a universal depression that felt so common for the first time, and traces the stories and personal experiences assembling a collective expression. By deep diving under the water, touching the surface of it and finally breathing outside, İşler Değişti / Change of Plans researches the impacts of the wave that struck exactly two years ago in March. On the other hand, in this post-pandemic world, the exhibition mourns the evolution that is felt within the bones of humanity, perhaps for the first time. Although we neglect the fact that the world resources are draining away, we perhaps feel it as a fatigue in our souls in a fragment of time that make us prefer to break off from the real world, in which the internet expands as a three dimensional space; our necks bowing down to screens, İşler Değişti / Change of Plans reminds us that there are still things worth looking and seeing in the real world.
The photographs in the exhibition are invitations to recall and figure out what to do with the shared emotions, ideas, anxieties, fears, and desires that we thought we may have forgotten, but were in fact stored in our subconscious. The exhibition is a questioning of how the conscious that is developed to battle a virus, ended up leading society into loneliness and but ironically creating the very need for solitude, to slow down despite the fast speed of the modern world that is impossible to catch up, to ‘stay at home’, and turn inwards. Meanwhile, it becomes a visual anthology of the leaks from what our unconscious — almost acting as an antivirus— tried to protect us from but that was then soaked up by photographs.
There is a sleep state in the main exhibition hall; in which the ground of reality is slipping under our feet, where the real and the imaginary are melting into each other, eyelids neither open nor closed, the world either spinning or stopping, a winter sleep. Whereas the back hall tries to move and move on, attempts to complete the life cycle through personal and worldly matters, where a ground for reality is searched with a desire to wake up. While doing that, it leans on the complicated relationship photography has with time and space.
Fittingly titled İşler Değişti / Change of Plans, in addition to the changes and habits that appeared in our lives due to pandemic, refers to the searches for authenticity and the shift in the photographic narrative of artists under the age of 30 compared to their previous generations.
