Adel Abidin 'Tasty', video installation, including two videos and cardboard, 2008 / courtesy Dagmar Schmidla Galerie, Köln
Until January 2009 Dagmar Schmidla Galerie, Cologne showcases the artists Adel Abidin, Andreas Herzau and Hüseyin Karakaya with their exhibition becoming a part of it.
Adel Abidin video-works explore cultural estrangement and their borders. In his use of form language, Abidin remains sarcastic, amusing and ironic.
What about the real relationship between the inside and outside. Who is inside and who is outside? That was the formula which leads him to think of doing this project. In the most of his works he investigates symbols and how they affect our daily lives. For the project Abidin built a mosque from sugar cubes and placed it near an anthill. The ants naturally became attracted by the mosque, and began wandering around it, climbing on its walls, breaking in. The viewer can speculate whether the ants are attracted to the mosque out of ritualistic impulses or out of a baser imperative to build or demolish.
Herzaus works put the person in the centre. As such, his pictures are a translation towards abstraction, a sort of broken reportage photographs, which not only wants to inform-, show but demands an exact look.
His plan is not to have any plan, not to adhere to any story or plot. It is about finding images and stories without looking for them and about taking the liberty of discovering the little things that are powerful enough to reveal the broader picture. He aims to capture the fleeting things and the impressions that can say so much about the mood in a country and where language fails to find a voice. His photographs examine reality as it were with the investigative look of an Ethnographer.
Moreover, the visual language of his work is formulated from the constant change between near and far from detail and full shot to distance and curiosity.
Hüseyin Karakaya is occupied in its installations and conceptual work with environments the immigrants, found and developed, and the socioeconomic conditions developing from it and conflicts. Often he compiles projects, which resemble an anthropological component of reading a city-spatial organism.
Karakaya has his own emotional view on the city of Istanbul: "As I step out of a plane, what I always feel at first is the taste of lead in my mouth resulting from a change in locality. After some haggling with the taxi driver, I proceed through the constant chaos around me while riding towards the end of the night. Together with this street-smart car driver I am almost flying and delve into the contradictions of Istanbul. Here everything exists simultaneously. This smart taxi driver can teach you the art of living in Istanbul or as it happened previously, he can also slit your throat. On occasion of the Feast of Sacrifice, the streets of Istanbul are bathed in the blood of the animals commemorating the sacrifice made by Prophet Ibraheem at Allah's command, to sacrifice his son Ishmael. While travelling into the night, one should not immediately fear at the sight of the screwdriver or the razor-sharp knife glittering horribly in the hand of the cab driver. Istanbul gives and takes, alişveriş, which makes it an ideal place for interchange. I feel the blazing anger in my cells which is the only way to survive in Istanbul. This also means challenging life which equally saves me from the fears that Germans feel towards death. That is why I have been roaming these streets for a couple of years now. In Istanbul I have found both friends and the feeling of belonging to places that I have not known before. This is what they call 'blind love' in Turkish!"
