It’s been a decade since the founding of Protocinema, one of the leading institutions in the contemporary art world with spaces in Istanbul and New York, so the celebrations are due. What better way to do this than with a unique 10th anniversary exhibition in the historic Beykoz Kundura in Istanbul?

The event, titled “Once Upon a Time Inconceivable,” is a group exhibit that takes a closer look at the processes of perception and realization at a time when established ideas about personal, local and global relationships are being reassessed, bringing together works by nine artists from Turkey and the United States.

The exhibition will feature artists Abbas Akhavan, Hera Büyüktaşçıyan, Banu Cennetoğlu, Ceal Floyer, Gülşah Mursaloğlu, Zeyno Pekünlü, Paul Pfeiffer, Amie Siegel and Mario Garcia Torres.

In collaboration with Beykoz Kundura, a cultural center converted from a former factory site of various Ottoman-era mass fabrications located on the northeast coast of Istanbul’s Bosporus, new specially prepared sculptures and installations for the exhibition by Akhavan, MursaloÄŸlu and BüyüktaÅŸcıyan will meet with art lovers for the first time.

American artist Paul Pfeiffer’s artistic video “Orpheus Descending”, originally installed in the World Trade Center three months before he was the target of terrorist attacks on September 11, will be restored 20 years after his release. first production and will be shown again for the exhibition.

Once Upon a Time Inconceivable, which will be held at Beykoz Kundura’s Yeni Kundura site, will be free to visit throughout the weekend.

Protocinema’s exhibition will launch on September 4 and will be open to visitors until October, offering a cross-examination of the duality of perception and understanding and their relationship to time and space while highlighting the process of cognition itself through works of art. that bend perceived time and space.

New sculptures and installations

The exhibit, which was composed during the pandemic as people were forced to rethink personal, local and global relationships and reconsider established ideas on these concepts, invites the audience to rethink how perception and understanding work. .

GülÅŸah MursaloÄŸlu’s new unique sculptures, entitled “Merging Fields, Splitting Ends”, offer concrete elements that play with the unidirectional understanding of time. MursaloÄŸlu’s sculptures use heat as an agent, which is also unidirectional in nature, both as a connector and as an irreversible flow between material states.

Meanwhile, Abbas Akhavan’s work also deconstructs time as his new sculpture uses temperature to stop movement, freezing what was once fluid.

Hera Büyüktaşcıyan uses a more spatial approach since she invests in the morphology of surfaces that bear the traces of time.

In the same space, we find the installation of Banu CennetoÄŸlu “ IKNOWVERYWELLBUTNEVERTHELESS ” which deals with denial, believing in something despite the experience that suggests the opposite, whose themes are relayed by 24 black mylar balloons in the shape of letter representing the title in Turkish.

On a slightly different medium, Zeyno Pekünlü offers a remake of the classic 1929 silent film “The Man with the Moving Camera” by director Dziga Vertov, hailed as a revelation in its time because it introduced many new techniques to the public.

The Pekünlü remake, titled “Without Camera”, is made up of 325 different videos shot by different people, put together from an online video sharing platform. As such, Pekünlü replaces the camera and cameraman with new technologies and devices, making humans only as appendages of a device.

Meanwhile, Amie Siegel’s “Quarry” offers a unique and intriguing marble history of the state of Vermont, home to the world’s largest underground quarry. The film traces the marble quarry to its high-end destination in Manhattan real estate, exposing a complex economy of production and speculation along the way.

Spoilers ahead!

It might be better to look away when it comes to the series by Mexican-American concept artist Mario Garcia Torres – or, he would say, it might be better to watch.

Torres’s works, posters revealing well-known Hollywood movie endings called “Spoiler Series,” are inspired by research that suggests knowing the ending of a narrative movie actually improves the viewer experience. When the viewer is not focused on an unknown outcome, they are able to maintain a better ability to read multiple layers of complexity.

Torres posters will be displayed across Istanbul in independent theaters.

Orpheus goes down to Istanbul, 20 years later

American artist Paul Pfeiffer’s “Orpheus Descending” will finally have a new home and complete its descent in Istanbul, 20 years since its original version was exhibited at the World Trade Center three months before the tragic events of September 11.

Multi-channel video allows viewers to watch a chick hatch from its egg and become an adult chicken during its 10-week life cycle, using cameras placed in a chicken coop on a poultry farm.

In the original live version of the installation, the chickens were displayed in real time. The new version, 20 years after its first production, brings together all that has been lost along the way in changing times and spaces.

“Once Upon a Time Inconceivable” will be held from September 4 to October 10 at Beykoz Kundura in Istanbul. The exhibition will be followed by a book project which will be launched in early 2022 and then distributed internationally.