18.45 Talks | I Never Promised You a Rose Garden • The talk featured artist Ali Şentürk and explored the experiences and possibilities of inhabiting a story while telling it, becoming lost within it and searching for a way out through different series from the artist’s practice. I Never Promised You a Rose Garden took place at İskele on Thursday, 9 June, at 18.45.
Ali Şentürk completed his undergraduate and graduate studies in the Department of Sculpture at Hacettepe University. In his artistic practice, he works across sculpture, painting, photography, video and performance. He conveys experiences from his own life, but more often those of others, through art’s interpretive, metaphorical and fictional language. Emerging from the intensive training in sculpture and drawing that he received during his undergraduate studies, his works aim to embody values such as light and shadow, space and volume, which constitute the construction of a sculpture, beyond their content. His drawings and canvases reflect emotions rooted in his personal history through films, memories and poems. In his first solo exhibition after graduation, he transferred his drawings onto canvas and extended the figures’ spirals of thought beyond the boundaries of the canvas using wires that began where the drawings ended. A few years later, as he transitioned from canvas to paper, the wire-like forms in his drawings evolved into simplified lines. Repetitions of units that become a ritual sometimes develop into works in which details disappear among dense lines and, at other times, into works in which the lines become almost invisible.
Alongside his drawings, research-based projects form another part of Şentürk’s artistic practice. Historical and Geological Corrections is an attempt to imagine and complete the underground sections of stones that have existed in nature for thousands of years or to repair them by reconnecting pieces that have broken away. Another series, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, is a semi-fictional documentation comprising photographs, hospital reports, drawings and a murder novel. Based on a newspaper article published in the 1960s, it transforms the story of a psychiatric patient whom the artist followed into his own story. Şentürk assumes the role of storyteller in projects of this kind. As described by Walter Benjamin in The Storyteller, the narrator draws a story from experience, takes it from oral tradition and contributes it back to that same tradition. Similarly, Şentürk’s works always add a contemporary perspective and new value to the stories they address. Operation Public Space, which he began in 2013 and is still ongoing, focuses on acts of violence against public monuments. Bringing together reports on nearly all the sculptures broken, attacked or removed between 2000 and 2018, the project confronts viewers as a forensic work resembling notes from a criminal investigation.
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