Dirimart readies to host İnci Eviner’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, Neural Crest of an Island, bringing together the artist’s recent moving image work of the same title and the installation titled Resound of the Studio, a revival of her studio at a gallery space.
Drawing lies at the centre of İnci Eviner’s work, where she builds and constantly enriches her artistic approach, strolling through a boundless visual language ranging from art historical allegories, images, illustrations, and mythologies to contemporary ideograms and pictograms. The artist’s moving image works offer the audience a multi-layered and alternative world of meaning and perception, where representational spaces, performative figures, and various visual/auditory elements interact and transform each other, making a whole. The outcome of the complex relations that Eviner establishes between video technologies and traditional painting, these moving images, examine historical, discursive, and unconscious processes, questioning and challenging the forms of representation and the norms leading up to these.
Inspired from Hayırsızada, an island in the Sea of Marmara, which bears the shadow of a past where 80,000 dogs were exiled and slaughtered in the early 20th century, İnci Eviner’ video work Neural Crest of an Island explores the fragile and transient nature of existence through a complex world of historical images, plants, and becoming-animal. In the video, the artist superimposes the island’s multiple cartographies, tracing the unexpected encounters created by these overlaps. She combines various scenarios to uncover what lies beneath the barren island, where complex interactions are acted out and entangled in a sensory and emotional web, fusing the social and the psychic.
Neural Crest of an Island offers a psychic choreography of the processes of subjectification in individual scenarios expressed on a stage where culturally coded images, concepts, discourses, and modes of representation are piled upon one another. Squirming minarets of the 18th-century Orientalist engravings by Antoine Ignace Melling, identifications or distinctions between a yellow wig extending from a minaret and the tails of a pair of grey horses, a man with an axe accompanying Antigone’s rhythm, and a puppet struggling with his puppeteer: all those figures emerging from an awry fantasy world are all engaged in an endless effort to decipher the codes of power.
At the exhibition, Eviner’s installation Resound of the Studio reveals her processes as an artist. To decode the fragmented and all-pervasive processes in her studio, the artist creates possible scenes of existence for the image fragments, photographs, costumes, sketches, and documents left behind by her works over time. In the installation, the remaining objects from her artworks, where Eviner positions herself as a stranger, multiply with new meanings, forming potential new relationships with one another. With the Resound of the Studio, Eviner returns to her studio to confront the cultural and psychic codes and habits that have infiltrated the deepest layers of identity.
The exhibition combines the intersections of history and violence on an island by employing the space offered by video technologies and present a first-time opportunity to look beyond Eviner’s works and her studio practice. Opening up a space for the liberation desire of the accumulated and restless memories of works from the artworks themselves, which has never reached their final form for the artist, Neural Crest of an Island can be visited at Dirimart Pera between 3 September–6 October 2024.
