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Interview: Taner Ceylan & Cigdem Asatekin

One of the most prominent figures in Turkish contemporary art, Taner Ceylan is renowned internationally for his hyperrealist paintings. What he strives for, though, is something beyond simple reproduction of reality—he’s after the sentiment. He calls his paintings works of “emotional realism,” and his process comes with technical, social, and even physical challenges: Ceylan is known to spend ten hours in front of his canvas, as still as he can be, without seeing anyone other than family and a couple of friends. [...]

Read more at Degree Critical.

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We Tell Ourselves Stories: A Symposium on Art, Politics, and Narrative

Organized by MFA Art Writing Students and Alumni

“We Tell Ourselves Stories” is an international symposium for enunciating and exploring some of the most urgent issues facing young and emerging practitioners in the field of art writing today. It is both named for and inspired by Joan Didion’s landmark essay “The White Album,” which tumbles through jump cuts, fragments, and juxtapositions to grapple with a set of wildly disturbing events in the summer of 1968. Heading into the equally disorienting summer of 2018, Didion’s text raises pertinent concerns about the efficacy of personal, confessional, and emotional modes of writing, particularly as they appear on the page alongside their analytical, philosophical, and political brothers.

More information here.

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I'm Not a Robot

Hung on the white gallery wall on eye level, Fragments is one of the first things to see upon entering Pace Gallery’s 24th Street location exhibit On the Body. It is a horizontal mirror made up of almost 200 smaller, identical square mirrors. As you approach this seemingly inanimate object, you feel like it looks back at you, and you wouldn’t be wrong. Moving back and forth to understand the structure, you begin to notice the small mirrors face and follow you, tracking your movements in front of the piece. They turn, with subtle robotic noises, distort your image into wave-like configurations. Your reflected face becomes impossible to see with your own eyes—the mirrors are the ones that see, much like the self-satisfied doors from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy—“all the doors in this spaceship have a cheerful and sunny disposition. It is their pleasure to open for you, and their satisfaction to close again with the knowledge of a job well done.” [...]

Read more on Degree Critical. 

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Silence of the Music

Lehmann Maupin is hosting a show so otherworldly that the white cube we’re accustomed to—and the sterile, untouchable cleanliness of the gallery space—is almost destroyed with OSGEMEOS’s site-specific, gallery-wide project Silence of the Music. [...]

Read more on Degree Critical.