Selin Davasse’s site-specific installation and sound performance involves pictorial and sculptural elements that deconstruct the iconography of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. By repurposing the image of the founder of “modern” Turkey in line with Renaissance perspective, the artist mixes the modernist idealization of European polyphony visually, with the tragically homophonic Turkish classical music of the early 20th century Kemalist cultural revolution sonically. At a time when ideas and aesthetics of the “universal” still signify “western”, Davasse interrogates contemporary artistic anxieties about producing work derived from commodified and exoticized identity that is ultimately tokenistic. It unveils the melancholy she feels as a politically self-motivated, yet aesthetically self-questioning artist from the Orient looking back on what has historically been accepted as artistic innovation.
Performance:
Tuesday Oct, 23, 8.30pm
Saturday, Oct 27, 5.30pm
