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İstiklal Cad. No.163 Mısır Apartmanı K.2&3 D.5&10 Beyoglu, 34433 – Istanbul, Istanbul, Turkey
Open: Tue-Fri noon-7pm

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Zilberman Projects – Istanbul presents Living Inside a Tale And There Only, featuring an extension of Burçak Bingöl’s solo exhibition Interrupted Halfway Through on view at Zilberman Gallery – Berlin last year.

With its highly textural and visual nature, Burçak Bingöl’s works deal with the notion of identity and cultural heritage, the in-between states and their representational and presentational issues. Interrupted Halfway Through takes its name from Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s book Beş Şehir (Five Cities), in which he makes a metaphorical comparison of Beyoglu, a district of Istanbul, to Paris.

For her exhibition in the Berlin space, Burçak Bingöl carries various fragments from Istanbul to Berlin and makes a visual experiment by colliding times and spaces. In Living Inside a Tale And There Only she reflects this collision back by carrying Berlin to Istanbul. She makes a site-specific installation by covering the wall of Istanbul gallery with visuals of the classical West-Berlin interior of Zilberman Gallery in the Charlottenburg area. The interior of the Berlin space becomes the background of ceramic “translations” along with her new works with porcelain bibelots -which depict a European life style. She shifts the architectural form and image to create a fictional space. The in-between state of this particular installation has direct references to Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s description of the old Istanbulite as Living Inside a Tale And There Only and the later feeling of yearning for an imagined modernity associated with European cities.

While creating a psychological as well as a political landscape on forgetting and remembering, Bingöl’s oeuvre scrutinizes hidden as well as imagined lost memories. Her show in Berlin resembles an excavation site, focusing on the social amnesia generated by state control as well as the syncopated connections between the East and the West. In her Berlin show Interrupted Halfway Through, channeling energies of different spaces, Bingöl carries not only wild plants and stones from Istanbul to Berlin, but also carries a piece of the gallery wall from Istanbul’s renowned art-nouveau style Mısır Apartment. The thin layers of the work Displaced Gallery Wall or A Fragmented Memory of a Rose, bring the New Wave—the recent (cultural and/or political) immigrants that came from Istanbul to Berlin—into mind. How do we engage with the new when we are displaced? How to adapt to a new environment? With a P.hD. in ceramics, Bingöl experiments with the methodology and grammar of ceramic’s cultural associations. How can collective memory be mirrored with ceramics that fracture might occur at anytime? Can failure be the starting point of a new fiction?

Interrupted Halfway Through and Living Inside a Tale And There Only both work on the connection of the two spaces of the gallery through this specific dialogue. It functions at the intersection of different traditions in Istanbul and Berlin, and making these historical and cultural interactions visible in subjective ways.

A book accompanies the exhibition with contributions by Sevinç Çalhanoğlu, Lotte Laub, Wendy Shaw and Simon Wachsmuth.