1+1

“THE ONE WHO TAKES YOU,BRINGS YOU BACK”

Bilsart is hosting Damla Sari’s exhibition entitled “The One Who Takes You, Brings You Back’” between May 17 – 27, 2023 as part of the “1+1” exhibition curated by İlayda Abdik.

1+1 consists of one living room and one bedroom. The living room is a private and potentially public space for an outsider, a window that opens to the resident’s personal space. The daily routines performed in this area come from the urge to abide by the norms of society for the observed (resident) and to get approval from the observer (guest); this is an unofficial agreement between the two. Especially in our society, the living room is open to the visitor’s judgments and inferences on the stance of the resident’s sociological, economic, and phycological state. This is so evident that gender roles are ascribed to rooms and objects and get enhanced with specific routines and actions that point to identity; the bedroom is the secret and private space. What happens here is personal and intimate, and the existence of this room remains in all its mystery. Özkan Işık and Damla Sari examine the gender roles attributed to parts of the house in two solo exhibitions and offer alternative perceptions of the assigned tasks. In 1+1, artists present (self)portraits of stereotyped personas based on sociological, psychological, and cultural components.

Damla Sari places soul prototypes on the objects she utilizes as bodies, which she constructs based on the impressions these objects and people create on her. While doing this, she observes the characters with an approach that references methods following psychoanalysis. Basing her practice on the impressions she gets from the behavioral patterns of these characters, Sari makes kinetic art, new media, and installation works. Using technology as a tool, the artist aims to have the viewers re-experience the emotions that got dulled due to technology’s development. Using the most primitive working principles of technology, Sari combines objects with the sentiments she observes. This togetherness becomes significant in preserving the existing feeling and re-experiencing it in a different layer. In the exhibition titled The one who takes you, brings you back the artist aims to create a space where every woman can position herself while simultaneously placing herself as the subject. While constructing these, she performs and determinately reiterates herself with the assigned gestures to women, then looks for ways of scraping it out of her skin.

ABOUT DAMLA SARİ

Damla Sari (1992, Ankara) graduated from Hacettepe University, Faculty of Fine Arts, Department of Sculpture in 2017. She has been continuing her postgraduate education at Marmara University Faculty of Fine Arts since 2021. She took part in Cer Modern Artist Residency Program in 2017. She took part in the 2021 Mamut Art Project selection with her kinetic installation called Come, Let Me Tell Your Face. She has been working with Art On Istanbul since December 2021. In September 2022, she held her first solo exhibition titled Questions of the Last 10 Years at Art On Istanbul. She has been accepted to the School of Visual Arts Summer Residency Program in New York City with the support of the American Turkish Association.