In her latest exhibition, Sezin Türk Kaya explores the micro-narratives of urban life using the technique of colography. Titled "Silent Witnesses of Life," the exhibition brings together the social memory and traces of time accumulated on the surfaces of buildings. We spoke with Sezin Türk Kaya about the exhibition, which opened at Red Rouge Art Gallery.
The "Silent Witnesses of Life" exhibition, which meets art lovers at Red Rouge Art Gallery, is the product of years of technical research and urban observations by academic and artist Sezin Türk Kaya. The exhibition offers the viewer an unusual experience of "looking" and "feeling."
Türk Kaya, who received her degree in art through her work on "Colography and Experimental Printmaking," now transforms the knowledge she imparts to her students as a professor at Bursa Uludağ University into living memory objects on the gallery walls. The artist's connection with the colloquial technique explains why each piece in the exhibition possesses such a powerful textural language.
Buildings, Memory Records of Shared Life
The exhibition treats architecture not merely as a structure of concrete and glass, but as a multi-layered carrier of social memory. In Türk Kaya's framing, buildings function as semi-permeable layers of memory, accumulating the sounds, movements, and shadows of the lives residing within them.
The laundry hanging from balconies or the shutters that change form according to the angle of the sun, as seen in works such as "Kardeşler Apartment" and "Kaplan Street," are actually silent but intense expressions of anonymized human relationships. The artist reconstructs the unique rhythm of the street through the language of lines and textures.
"Making the Sediment of the City Visible"
In her works, Kaya focuses on urban processes caught between the metropolis and the countryside. In these spaces left to their own devices, the works, where incompatible structures coexist, also present the dilemmas created by chaotic urbanization. Structures that don't depict any particular city, in particular, render the spaces anonymous. This becomes even more significant when considering that many different cities, from Istanbul to Ankara, are victims of chaotic urbanization. Kaya expressed her perspective on urban space in her works with these words:
"The buildings lining the streets and avenues accumulate the sediment of time on their surfaces while also telling us about the rhythms established at the neighborhood scale. In this exhibition, I tried to re-read these structures, which I describe as silent witnesses to living together, on that tension line between transience and permanence."
Kaya, who uses the colloquialism technique on cardboard instead of the usual metals and chemicals, emphasized that this method is also harmless to health. Noting that works done with chemicals would harm the artist in the long term, Kaya underlined that this technique using cardboard is more durable. Regarding the relationship between technique and content, she added:
"... "Colography and experimental printmaking are, for me, the most honest tools for depicting the multi-layered, rough, and sometimes chaotic structure of the city. When working with the texture of a wall or a shadow, I'm actually questioning how the city responds to the subject's gaze. That experimental approach, which I focused on throughout my academic research, created this tangible world I've established with the viewer in this exhibition."
In the Footsteps of Time and Space
From the naiveté captured in a potted plant in front of a window in her small-scale colography titled "Naz," to the gray grandeur of massive apartment blocks, Sezin Türk Kaya subtly explores "the wounded but unbreakable bond that humans have with the city." The exhibition witnesses, both tactilely and visually, the sense of "neighborhood" that we are beginning to lose with the speed of urban transformation, while showing how these spaces are presented as they are, without romanticization. Kaya, who does not include any living figures other than humans or plants in her works, places the textures of the spaces in which the viewer lives at the center of her attention.
Reporter: Ahmet Çağatay Bayraktar
Source: https://www.24saatgazetesi.com/sezin-turk-kaya-yasamin-sessiz-taniklarinda-mekanin-ve-anilarin-izlerini-suruyor