Gallery Bosfor presents Ilgın Seymen’s fifth solo show titled Unemployed Objects • Traces of Vitality between May 13 and June 18. Ilgın Seymen’s exhibition revolves around relations with the environment and is set up around an intertwining and interlacing of forest, earth, sea, and the sky. It questions where the environment begins and ends, when the surroundings are considered as extensions of the body. Focusing on the ambiguity of boundaries between environmental elements and the subject, the show invites the audience on a contemplative cruise in between visual fields with shifting distances from the nearest to the farthest.
We may say that Seymen’s artistic practice starts with a dialogue between herself and the world. As traces of her observations, research and contemplation practices on the subjects of her interest, her works, abstracted from the igniting thoughts, become carriers of their own processes. In Unemployed Objects • Traces of Vitality the artist reexamines culturally ingrained distinctions between subject-object relations as well as organic-synthetic matters and reevaluates valuing. She transforms objects deemed as dysfunctional and worthless into attractive and inviting forms. In the installation Unemployed Objects, as a gesture of “reanimation”, she gives a touch of shimmer with color, glitter and crystals to the pieces of rubble leftovers of a demolished building.
As an artistic strategy, Seymen adopts the methods of Romantic Era authors in the acts of seeking virtues through observation of nature. Yet, she evaluates the relationality between the environment and humans within the present conditions, and seeks to generate worldly and personal virtues through examination of contemporary materials of the current environment. In her works inspired by the writings of R.W. Emerson and the poem of S.T. Coleridge on the attitudes of existing with nature, she considers not only objects but also ideas as the “traces of vitality”, and in this context, through the fluidity of form, writing and thinking achieve an evanescent state evoking the effect of transformation in the values and time.
While choosing the fittest carrier to present the outcomes of her research process, Ilgın Seymen gives room for re-creation to simple remnants of human life. In her exhibition encompassing works in different media like collage, video, sculptures and installations made with material leftovers of human life, she proposes to take a fresh detailed look at the environment that which she portrays as an infinite space without a point of beginning or ending. Here, the distinctions between the animate and inanimate, natural and synthetic, felt and known, visible and invisible dissolve, and form a complex unity by ways of intertwining relations, as it also happens in the innermost world of the artist.
