Zilberman is hosting Erinç Seymen’s solo exhibition Kīpuka between May 18 and August 2, 2024. The exhibition, which features artists’ recent works, creates a compelling dialogue between disaster, temporality, and control.
The exhibition titled Kīpuka derives its name from the Hawaiian word for an island formed by surrounding lava flows—a land that survives and is preserved amid chaos and disaster. This physical separation is a metaphor for a state of isolation or detachment from the external world.
Throughout the exhibition, Seymen highlights the distinct discrepancy between the borders of knowledge and unawareness. The exhibition explores the temporality of disaster, knitting a trajectory of the timelessness of tragedy by highlighting instances of mythology and history. While the artist has previously delved into social relations and class in his exhibitions, he now examines the other side of the coin, weaving a biopolitical nexus between class dynamics, control and its temporality.
Kīpuka intersects with the concept of disaster in complex ways, reflecting upon broader societal power dynamics and responses to crises, it ponders upon the temporality of disaster and its unifying power amidst society. In works such as Jugendglück,
In Untitled and Kīpuka, the artist delves into the governance of disasters, whereas, in works titled Gods and Disasters, Arms of Tantalus, MisPrintce, and PlanC, the artist focuses on the governance of power. Seymen delves into the relationship between control and temporality in his video works, Alle gegen alle, Troubadours and Insured. Drawing a line on how time changes the effects of disasters and control in the society.
The work that gives the exhibition its name, Kīpuka, showcases a drawing of a sleeping child amidst a volcanic eruption. Influenced by the word itself, Seymen points out the silent moment before a disaster; forming a land of peace along with unawareness.
The artist uses time as a messenger of disaster; time emphasizes the forthcoming disaster power amidst silence, and time becomes the perpetuity and the transience at the same time. Seymen continues pondering on disaster and knowledge with two artworks; Jugendglück and Untitled. The artist creates a parallel between the two artworks by questioning the notion of disaster, how the public decides to name a situation as disaster, and disaster’s interchanging role in shaping society. Seymen creates a discourse within works by delving into different instances from mythology and history and their exchange with control and disasters.
