Reflections from the Terrace
Elgiz Museum Terrace Exhibitions welcomes visitors with an exhibition featuring works by invited artists in its 13th year.
In selecting the 36 artists invited to exhibit their works this summer, our guiding principle was to bring together sculptors who have participated in our exhibitions over the years and have become integral to and supporters of this process. Our desire to bring together young and mid-career sculptors who we believe have left their mark on the Terrace and who continue their production uninterrupted is also a summary of the past twelve years.
The title of the exhibition, curated with a close look at previous years, prepares us to evaluate the past and set out on a new journey with a fresh perspective.
The Terrace Exhibition, which was planned at the suggestion of Haşim Nur Gürel as part of the museum's 10th anniversary celebrations, emerged in 2012 with the decision to provide a space for sculptors to exhibit their work, and its first edition featured sculptors under the age of 40. The idea of expanding the limited space allocated to sculpture in our country's art scene led us to make the exhibition a tradition from the following year onwards. The point reached by Turkey's first contemporary art museum in its goal of bringing sculptors together with the art community every year now stands before us with its achievements, which can be examined under different headings.
Organised under the principle of an open call, Teras' exhibitions, which have been held with invited artists in some years, serve as interim evaluations of contemporary sculpture art. In this context, our first exhibition, opened in 2014 under the title 52-62, offered an opportunity to evaluate the new productions of a generation that received their art education between the late 1960s and the late 1970s. In 2017, the exhibition titled ‘Tribute to the Masters of Sculpture,’ held on the 100th anniversary of Auguste Rodin's death, featured invited artists who paid homage to him and Camille Claudel through their works.
Bringing together artists trained at different art institutions in Turkey, Teras became a sculpture festival of sorts, taking on a special meaning with its character that strengthened meetings, getting to know each other, and solidarity with each exhibition. Providing a platform for sculptors to share their current productions and techniques and engage in discussion, this structure goes beyond the boundaries of education, establishing a new school and embracing a new public sphere. To be honest, this was not one of our goals when we first planned the event, but over the years, it has transformed Teras from a static exhibition into a shared space. Each work transcends its own meaning and merges with the meaning of others, resulting in a powerful social message that unites us all.
When we look at the event as a whole today, we see that the concepts chosen for the exhibitions held so far have enabled artists to respond quickly with their contemporary, vital counterparts, fostering an action-oriented attitude and creating a collective meaning in the Terrace Exhibitions.
Başka Bir Tepeden (From Another Hill), which focuses on Istanbul, to Dünyada Hayat Var mı? (Is There Life in the World?), which points to ecological destruction, Herşeye Rağmen (Despite Everything) during the pandemic, Kaçak Gölge (Illegal Shadow), Ufuk Hattı (Horizon Line), Görülmeyenler (The Unseen), and our latest exhibition, Bir Düş'ün İzinde (In the Footsteps of a Dream), these exhibitions have created a dynamic structure that brings local and global issues to the forefront of artists' agendas through their contexts. These concepts, which transform the physical space from an exhibition area into a utopian island, support production that opens up to experimental approaches alongside traditional expression and the questioning, critical language of contemporary art, enabling us to bring the dynamic axis of sculpture to the audience. This dynamic effect created a spatial memory by connecting sculptures from previous exhibitions, whose traces, shadows, colours, and sounds remained on the terrace surface, with invisible rings, and transferred this memory to the next exhibition.
The Terrace is a street suspended in the air, a square, a park, seeping into the city, becoming part of it. Its architectural position makes its spatial dimensions transparent and permeable, opening itself to the outside. At this point in the city, it floats in the sky under the sun, wind, and rain, within the chaotic fabric that surrounds it. This unusual situation, this state of not touching the ground, creates new layers of interpretation on the works, strengthening the open reading of the exhibition as a whole. The unusual arrangement of the exhibition, where each sculpture intersects and converses with another, deepens the visual impact of the exhibition and broadens its range of meaning. The singularities of the works based on their context, form, and material are multiplied due to these overlaps. By encouraging the viewer to move around, without determining a direction, and guiding them from one work to another on the surface, the installation technique, which in a sense allows the viewer to surf, transforms the viewer into a participant. Referring to Henri Lefebvre's concept, a new dynamic emerges in these coordinates where the space is reproduced with the social connotations of the triangle formed by the artist, the artwork, and the viewer. Transforming from an exhibition space to an agora, the volume re-establishes all its components based on interrelationships. This dialectical unity and multifaceted dynamic effect, intertwined with the historical process of sculpture in our country, once again reminds us of the liberating expressive possibilities of art.
Terrace Exhibitions, which have opened up space for sculpture with unprecedented continuity by motivating artists in the challenging production conditions of sculpture, have also paved the way for an undeniable cultural accumulation from the perspective of the audience. Viewers who experience the right to access art, a fundamental right of the city, in this non-profit space integrated into the city, especially the children who visit our exhibitions, leave the terrace as carriers of art's transformative reflections. Our exhibitions, which enable large-scale sculptures suitable for natural conditions to be included in private art collections, have also achieved notable results in this regard.
Embracing all this rich memory and accumulation, the Terrace Exhibitions, now in their 17th year, resist the destruction of the culture industry by referring to art's gains in empowering and liberating the individual, imagination, mental production, and publicness, and to the process of transforming art into design.
Once again, we are faced with works that will open new horizons for us. Sculptors bring us together with their unique languages, concepts, and plastic interpretations, rich in associations that extend from art to life. We are delighted to present the sculptures of the participating artists to the public and the art community.
Nilüfer Ergin
Support Us Membership Categories
