17 March – 30 April 2023 / Vision Art Platform
Do you remember how did you end up here? When you look back, can you remember what you accomplished, where you went wrong, who the people around you were, when you slept, when you woke up, and how the hours, days, and months passed? Everything is proceeding slowly behind such a veil of a blur. There is only now, and it seems like it will never end. Maybe the past never happened and the future will always be far away just because of that when we can’t reach out and touch it. You felt that big break that you were sure happened somewhere at the bottom. However, its effect is still showing. As if the ground had been pulled from under his feet; You’re swimming alone in space, and the water is a little cloudy.
You counted how many years of your life you have left behind, but do you know how many years are left? No matter how much time you have spent here, you seem to have just opened your eyes to this world; Every day, every moment,
you encounter new things. Maybe your body is wrapped in a daze: this city you live in is slowly making you sick. How long are you putting up with it? How much longer will you endure? The sounds of cars mix with the sounds of construction during the daytime, the soil is crushed more by the weight of the concrete as tires of different sizes trample the asphalt roads like your legs crushed by the weight of your mind trampled by thoughts. Maybe you look at your face in the mirror every morning to make sure you’re still alive. When you notice a new line that he has added under the eyes in the cruel flow of time, you are shaken with a feeling of being late.
All the things you want to get rid of, try to leave behind, and forget, are with you in the endless ocean in which you have lost your sense of direction. And you understand this: either you will let yourself go entirely with that flow, or you will first become displaced and then become a nomad. You choose the third option: you will turn everything upside down, turn the ocean into the sky. Now all the piers, all the grounds of meaning on which you will base your ideas, will “rise” to where the sky used to be. Every time the sand inside you pours down, you will reverse the same hourglass, reliving and feeling certain moments. When the effect of the breaking begins to be felt on the surface, the beginnings will evolve into the end and the endings will evolve into the beginning.
Ground Swell, through Semih Zeki’s recent works, shows the big breaking moments in our lives and then the ever-increasing changes, through works in different techniques such as painting, printing, and sculpture. The exhibition consists of works that emerged at the end of a process in which the artist focuses on the urban issues, the psychological extensions of the changing socio-cultural structures of the metropolises, and the ethical struggle of the individual in the process of being, presents the tremors of the era we live into the viewer from the perspective of the artist, by tracing the moments of breaking in the mind and the depths of life. The series, spread over two floors of the gallery space and produced by the artist in the last two years, reveals Zeki’s life, perception, thinking, and creation processes with all their transparency. This exhibition setup, which allows a two-way reading in terms of time, allows the viewer to explore the layers of the artist’s complex relationship with form, color, and expression.
It doesn’t matter how you got here.
The wave takes us all to new states of ourselves.
Now you know.
Sinan Eren Erk