UNNAMED
Nazan Azeri’s latest works titled “Unnamed” can be viewed at CDA Projects Gallery between October 21 – November 27, 2010.
Nazan Azeri has transformed the kind of houses drawn by elementary school children into sculptures. She puts on an interdisciplinary exhibition with her installation of small houses turned upside down, videos, paintings and pattern drawings, consisting of photographs that have been scribbled on.
She traces that which is behind the current symbolic order by covering/scribbling over, taking off, dragging, hanging on trees and deconstructing the significance of clothes/covers. The scribbles she has created with photographs and pattern drawings deconstruct the religious symbolic language and have us face the “emptiness” behind it. Women are only visible when they are a veil, spot, emptiness or a loss within the symbolic order.
The stairway slopes in the paintings, leading towards different directions, geometric images being used together with organic images, organic images used together with inorganic images… This is the form of a sentence that states many different cutting edge approaches all at once.
The meanings conveyed in Nazan Azeri’s works make us realize how pro tempore the things we accept as givens and attribute eternity without thinking are. Her works remind us of a certain state of the experience or the object that cannot be gotten through by that cliché, which we agree upon, actually overlaps most of the time and carries within it an ideology.
On the other hand, there is a narrative and locations regarding how our internal architecture has been set up but how the various locations we are residing in are attached to each other and how they take up a place in our memories need to be reconstructed over and over again.
In this sense, these paintings also take us to an inner world that needs to be reconstructed but also has a construction of its own with never-ending repetitions, stairways that don’t seem to lead anywhere, walkways with no ends and interlacing of the architectural interior and the nature…
With their space construction that is symbolic and ideological, they seem to be standing somewhere between a feeling of being let down and their dreams. For this reason, the works have a side to them that is rather sensitive. This is the significance of the space construction on the canvas and the overlapping of different space plans. In this sense, these paintings can be compared to the Dutch interiors from the 17th and 19th centuries. They seem to be attempting what was once attempted by the Dutch interiors. What holds the space we’re living in together is indeterminate. The importance of the paintings is that they make us feel that which seems as a whole, the whole that darts in and out of our sight. These things, which are attached to each other, that any part can be seen from any end, the room leads to somewhere and an instant is repeated in different tones, says something about us carrying the space within us.
Nazan Azeri, attempts to discover a new way to see-construct by bending and distorting the forms and playing with the scales just like the Russian constructivists who wished to take a different perspective on things and to reconstruct them.