Happy
Robert Barta develops his work from what surrounds us daily. His pieces arise less from the form of an object than from an idea
that materializes within an object. He works with inversions and shifts, with interventions that disrupt familiar orders and detach
them from their usual context.
The works do not require deciphering in the classical sense; rather, we as viewers are drawn into the thought process. Many
works only unfold in the encounter with their counterpart. It is not the object alone that produces meaning, but the perception of
those who encounter it. His art can thus be understood as an open process in which perception, language, and action mutually
influence one another.
Stefanie Trojan changes the way we perceive things. She focuses her attention on interpersonal relationships. She doesn't work
with everyday objects, but with everyday gestures: a touch, a hug, a request, a question. These are gestures we know from our
daily lives and that structure our interactions almost imperceptibly. In her performances, she not only uses her own body as an
artistic medium, but also incorporates the bodies of the visitors. She herself says: "I try to expand the concept of performance by passing the action on to the viewers. Their reaction completes my work.“ The performance doesn't lie solely in the artist's action, but arises where others react: in hesitation, in going along with it, in rejection, or in helping. The work unfolds between people and in their reactions.
Dream without Action is Hallucination
With the emergence of a thought — before existence fully settles into form — everything remains possible. Yet it is precisely this field of possibility that is most fragile. Because action is the first intervention that stabilizes thought. It defines it somewhere, gives it limits. What remains without action begins to dissolve; it disperses, multiplies. After a certain point, it no longer resembles a thought, but an image instead. The distance between what is real and what is imagined — between what waits and what is withheld — becomes increasingly indistinct.
This exhibition positions itself exactly within that threshold. Rather than asking when an image gains reality, it traces the moment in which it begins to disappear.
Buğra Erol’s practice proposes a system for holding onto the image. Structures formed through slide collages repeat a process in which accumulated and selected visual fragments generate new images through a specific order. The archive here is not merely a memory belonging to the past, but an active mechanism of decision-making.
What is preserved, what is eliminated, what becomes visible again — these gestures of direction define the possible conditions through which the image may unfold. Such decisions slowly move what is still unresolved toward a conceptual framework.
The moment language enters this structure, the image no longer remains confined to what is merely visible; it is carried onto a definable ground. It no longer appears solely as something experienced, but as something that can be cognitively grasped. Because it is understood that within the passage between the intuitive and the conceptual, the image does not become fixed; rather, meaning itself begins to define its own limits through that transition. The word “Licht,” encountered before the image itself at the first point of contact with the work, intensifies meaning rather than explaining it. It does not define what is visible, but transforms it into a threshold for meaning and for the act of interpretation itself.
Odey’s intuitive watercolors and paintings, meanwhile, generate a resistance against this condition of definition. Forms emerge, yet they never fully resolve. Every trace appears as the continuation of the previous one, while simultaneously functioning as its dissolution. The works exist not as the result of an idea, but as the state in which that idea remains open to all of its possibilities.
When considered together, these two approaches release the image from being a fixed structure. Archive and intuition operate as two methods in constant transformation. One keeps; the other evokes. One draws boundaries; the other renders those boundaries permeable.
Within the exhibition, the viewer moves continuously between these two gestures. What is encountered is neither fully constructed nor entirely dissolved. Every form carries within itself both decision and possibility.
Perhaps this is why no image here is ever fully completed.
And perhaps for this very reason, no image ever entirely disappears.
Begüm Güney