Scanner

Galeri Bosfor is hosting Barış Göktürk's solo exhibition Scanner / Tarayan between 21 September – 04 November. In his exhibition held in Istanbul after 10 years from his last solo, Barış Göktürk deals with the idea of seeking through painting and sculpture, starting from the scanning light of the digital.

Barış Göktürk's practice focuses on the multi-layered relationship between the body of the individual and the body determined and reshaped by power. This artistic production, stemming from a political trigger in a way, finds a deep expression with a new language that the artist creates by forcing the possibilities of the material and the way he makes use of it. The artist reconstructs documents about current and historical events or individuals existing in or against power paradigms with drawings, paintings, sculptures, and installations. The transformation process, which oscillates between the personal and the political, results in the objectification of open data in a closed and distant style and its evolution into an intuition.

The exhibition is a projection of a control-oriented, state-company-centered processes of “scanning” to painting and the pictorialunderstanding of the body. While the scanning method of the scanner device with vertical lights establishes a directly recognizable structure in the pictures, sculptures feet scan the space in an effort to find a place and direction of movement. While the obligatory and uncanny journeys of people under the pressure of geographical, economic, and social necessities are scattered in the exhibition space through the sculptures, the paintings define the border on the walls. The scan in the paintings has a mechanical and predictable reference, whereas the scanning by the sculptures is human and unpredictable.

Scanner / Tarayan is a note that Barış Göktürk jots down in a world and at a time when the existence and capacity of human beings are challenged to the maximum. While both the picture and the body lose their center in his paintings, in which the bodily fragments are compressed by digital light and vertical stripes, sculptures of feet seeks the missing center.