Melis Babadağ’s exhibition, ‘A Situation Happening to the Sun,’ is on view at DG Art Project until June 14. The exhibition invites visitors to explore the artist’s production practice by taking them on a journey where memory, emotion, and image intersect.
Artist and actress Melis Babadağ’s second solo exhibition, A Situation That Happened to the Sun, is hosted by DG Art Gallery with the contributions of curator Dr. Zeynep Öztürk.
This exhibition can be read as a profound expression not only of Babadağ’s creative process in plastic arts, but also of her individual memory, childhood perception and an intuitive visual language. The exhibition makes visible the artist’s artistic production process, which she describes as “a place where she loses her perception of time and space”, through images shaped in the abstract geography of the inner world.
Babadağ’s artistic practice is based on an approach that finds its origins in childhood memory, bears autobiographical traces and stands out with its improvisational production style. Her response to her mother’s question “What have you done here?” to a painting she made when she was only 4 years old, “A situation that happens to the sun”, appears today as a metaphor that shapes both the title of the exhibition and its general spirit. This response is notable for representing an early intuition of the artist’s inner world and linguistic simplicity. Babadağ’s childhood saying is transformed into an artistic concept years later, establishing a connection between the artist’s personal memory and the viewer’s experience.
The 25 works in the exhibition consist of the artist’s recent works. In addition to paintings made with acrylic paint on canvas, four digital prints are also on view. These digital works draw attention as a new medium that Babadağ has previously experimented with individually, but with this exhibition, she opens it up to public sharing. The combination of digital and traditional techniques expands the artist’s expressive possibilities.
The formal language in the works draws attention with the intertwining of the figure and the background, the balance of narrative and abstraction, and the blurring of boundaries. Babadağ’s art reflects the expression of emotional processes and inner states rather than a classical figurative or abstract approach. This visual language, which can be defined as fantastic realism, combines dreamlike elements with the emotional projections of reality. In this respect, Babadağ’s production reminds us of the permeable boundaries between art and psychological processes. The reconstruction of repressed or forgotten emotions through images transforms the works into emotional memory fragments rather than aesthetic objects.
