The third exhibition with Cevdet Erek, titled Faça at Galerie AKINCI in Amsterdam, reflects a slang word in Turkish, borrowed from Italian (faccia), connected to the words face, façade, typeface, interface and others. In Faça, Cevdet Erek will present four new works, the most recent of which gives the title to the exhibition.
Cevdet Erek‘s new work further develops the conceptual and formal relationships in his work Rulers & Rhythm Studies (2007 – 2011), currently part of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam’s collection display.
The continued approach of large‐scale spatial interventions is evident in the progress of his installations; in the show Week at Kunsthalle Basel in 2011, the installation and performance Room of Rhythms at dOCUMENTA (13) in 2012 – reflected also in his publication Room of Rhythms 1 published by Walter König – his installation re‐illumination at MAK Vienna, his total architectural proposal Alt Üst at Spike Island, Bristol this year and also A Room of Rhythms – Curva in the MAXXI Museum in Rome which just opened this November, revealing another aspect of the series.
The work Faça (2014) involves Erek’s impressions formed when visiting a city for the first time. He fused these impressions with a research project on Greek avant‐garde urban planner and architect Constantinos Doxiadis along with fragments from the Greek architectural magazine Arkitektoniki from the 1970s. From personal notations to Southern Modernism, to old ladies looking down from balconies above – the artist’s annotations form repetitive interludes within the framework and perpendicular rhythm of the magazine layout and are a constant work in progress.
In a second work Day (2012) Erek takes the natural rhythm of light as his starting point – and translates it back into artificial light. A LED display – often used to show texts – pulses from left to right. Like most of Erek’s works, Day is always site‐specific. A series of LEDs depicts minutes of daylight have been calculated for the duration of the exhibition at AKINCI (one LED bulb represents one minute). This work is representative of the artist’s strategy of converting instruments that usually measure space or display textual information into tools to measure time.
The Faça Ornamentations (2014), specially composed for the exhibition and the space at AKINCI will echo in the attachment space into the important early work Avluda/In the Courtyard (2002), a triptych video projection, consisting of a collage of images filmed at the Istanbul Technichal University in Istanbul. Several visual and temporal collage techniques were employed in order to realize a panoptic experience. The work can be seen as an early experiment for capturing an intense experience – playing with continuity and pause in time and space. For this installation Erek selected and processed an archive of video footage and sound recordings which he made in two unused courtyards of the university where he spent most of his time as a researcher and recording engineer.
Solo exhibitions (selection): Faça, AKINCI, Amsterdam (2014); Alt Üst, Spike Island, Bristol (2014); Jahrundtagundtag‚ Wentrup, Berlin (2014); Re‐‚ Mor Charpentier, Paris (2014); Pattern Anti Pattern‚ duo show with Slavs and Tatars, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart (2013); Week, Kunsthalle Basel, Basel (2012); Update, Akinci, Amsterdam (2011); Ahmet Cevdet Bey, duo show with Ahmet Öğüt, Overgaden, Copenhagen (2011); A Few Retrospectives, Amsterdam (2008).
Group exhibitions (selection): Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam Collection display (2014); MAXXI, Rome (2014); Istanbul Modern, Turkey (2014); Marrakech Bienniale 5, Marrakech (2014); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2014); MAK, Vienna (2013); Sharjah Biennial 11, Sharjah (2013); 7th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT) (2012); CCA Wattis, San Francisco (2012); dOCUMENTA 13, Kassel (2012); SALT, Istanbul, (2012); New Museum Triennial, with Ala Younis and group, New Museum, NY, (2012); 12th istanbul Biennial, Istanbul (2011); Arter, Istanbul (2011); Tate Modern, London (2011).