A pair of installations propped up by initiatives independent of the mainstream art world features sculptural works and a wall sketch by Pınar Marul at İMÇ 5533 in Fatih, while across town in Cihangir the YAYA vitrine of Viable Istanbul is screening ten collaborative films by Matthew Burdis and Jon Baker. In tandem, their eccentricities orbit a similar light.
Marul’s show, titled, “Dog Whistle”, is an evocation of deformity in nature. Within its whiteout, industrial space housed inside the fifth block of the Istanbul Textile Market (known by its Turkish acronym İMÇ), Marul splayed the semblance of retinal veins with acrylic, titling it, “Saboteur”. The centerpiece, “Blue Velvet” is a sapphire likeness of deer antlers, covered in a kind of felt, their bulbous roots surface into the dusty air like barnacles and mushrooms.
“Dog Whistle” has that glaring objectivity of impractically garish, idiosyncratically imagined objects out front, unobscured by reflections and their framing, even if spatially cognizant. Yet, their presence still demands intellectuality in order to stand where they are, on their own, as, for example, a treatise on the inhuman mutations of environmental change, its indifference visualized by their formal estrangement.
As a sculptor, Marul is steadfast within the bounds of her medium, an unexplained emanation of physical substance, there. Her piece, “My Mom’s Fears”, comprised of found objects stuck together in a three-dimensional square of epoxy, is a tableau of sculptural readymade locked onto the wall by a television mount. The symbolism is, as it were, like a memory, or a dream, open to psychoanalytic interpretation, perhaps a touch of the Electra complex.
Pınar Marul, Köpek Isırığı sergisinden
Within the spare, cubic curation, owing to its grounded, workshop aesthetic founded by artists Nancy Atakan and Can Küçük, Marul had a sea cliff rock lugged in, for the piece, “Hidden”, topping off its heavy presence with a translucent burst of epoxy, like a tentacle moving up into the cold hospital lighting from within the mineral substance. It is, itself, a piece of nature torn from its origins, blooming with a slight, mutant formation as part of its new, artificial ecology.
Within the little office at 5533, Marul strung up a chain in the frenetic design of a spider who, has been indulging in too much caffeine. The piece satirizes status quo work life from a nonhuman perspective, in which creativity itself is admired, even in the absence of a creator.
And there is a spidery sensibility to the web-like five-channel installation of “The Idealist and the Contrarian” at the YAYA vitrine of Viable Istanbul.
Filmmakers Burdis and Baker evoked a hybrid tone of immersion in experiential naturalism, their lenses trained on moving landscapes, verdant, arboreal, with a healthy dose of jump cuts swirling upward toward the sky and double exposed with figments of leaves, rural architecture. There is a pained visionary pull within their works, akin to that of Marul, as one of a generation who have resigned their fate to the tragedy of being one with nature in the Anthropocene era.
Doomed to the fate of global leadership that capitalizes on the dregs of climate change anxiety when and where it suits their personal interests, these artists’ works are intensely subjective, clouded in mystical ambiguity. Burdis and Baker subsumed the dead leaves and shed skin of their surroundings into an anthropomorphic personification of their respective individualities reconciled within the whole, while imperfect world.
Marul showed the human effect on plants, animals and stones, as if from their point of view. And by inhabiting each other’s frames, Burdis and Baker have enacted a resonant projection of universal empathy, in all of its horrifying and unsightly truths.