The solo exhibition titled Emanet by Vuslat, curated by Ebru Yetiskin, will be open to the public from May 22nd to July 30th, 2024, at the MSGSU Tophane-i Amire Cultural and Art Center Five Domes Hall.
The exhibition invites exploration of various manifestations of the concept of “Emanet” which embodies values such as trustworthiness, loyalty, care, fidelity to one’s word, and guardianship. It encompasses Vuslat’s sculptures, paintings, poems, sound-based works and installations.
In Sara Ahmed’s words, can we embrace emanet as “a kind of optimism that does not know what awaits oneself, sets off on a path that one does not know, and does not attribute content to its destination” today? Ebru Yetiskin
The Emanet exhibition, which took place at the Baksı Museum last year, is being reimagined this time as a narrative landscape and a polyphonic memory recording open to cinematographic thinking. As a crystallization of thought, each artwork of Vuslat, is situated under the five domes as a memory sequence.
“In the exhibition, which has many momentums, for a moment, we may see what is lost behind the misty mountains from a bird’s eye view. At another moment, we can shift to a molecular perspective and focus on how we store, preserve, or modify the information we receive from our ancestors as we walk around a DNA-structured chain. We remember which moments of life we recorded in our memory, how we established connections with our memory records and also with those that we never forget. Sometimes we float gently in the air. Sometimes we stand side by side and embrace the healing and hopeful power of those that shine in gloomy times and spaces to avoid the darkness of the present and the future moments, which may seem like a black hole to us. Thanks to the dynamism of these shifting perspectives, we can become mobile, deterritorialized and reterritorialized. As we wander among narrative landscapes that extend from one memory sequence to the next, projecting life on ourselves like a film, we experience a state of coexistence that both allows self-reflexivity and opens up to the other possibilities of imagining life.” Ebru Yetiskin
Alongside Vuslat’s own works, the exhibition is accompanied by collaborative efforts with other artists. The piece titled Embrace, a collaboration between artist Pelda Aytas and Vuslat, invites contemplation on the meanings of the word “emanet” shared in the cultural geography we inhabit and spoken in nine different languages. Deriving from the root “e-m- n,” the word “emanet” presents its equivalents in Aramaic-Syriac, Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Turkish, Greek, and Kurdish. Vuslat, in collaboration with artist Alican Okan, has produced the audio content for the exhibition, sharing memory recordings that provide insights into the works featured in the exhibition.
The exhibition, offering an inspiring opportunity to strengthen the connections we forge with ourselves and the world, will be open for visits every day except Mondays from 10:00 to 17:00 until July 30th.
Press release from MSGSU Tophane-i Amire Cultural and Art Center
Image: Vuslat. Bayburt I. 2023. Charcoal and natural pigments produced from local earth and stones from Gumushane/Bayburt on canvas. 180 x 230 cm. Image courtesy of the artist
