Bihter Yasemin Adalı invites viewers to the thresholds between life and death, the known and the repressed unconscious, and the inner and outer worlds. Like Pinot Gallizio’s industrial paintings reminiscent of production lines, or Niki de Saint Phalle’s shot canvases bearing the reverberations of war, Adalı’s works bring to the surface the somatic seepage of both personal and collective memory. As we listen to the sounds rising from the chandeliers suspended from the paintings, we hear inner and outer voices emerging from everyday life. Adalı captures objects in time in a trance-like state, precisely at the moment they are about to become something else, depicting a letter envelope on the threshold of turning into a house, a padlock into a sarcophagus or a temple.
The state of “existing on the threshold” describes a condition of being neither fully inside nor outside, neither entirely in the past nor the future, nor wholly in the present. Existing in limbo deepens through the botanical and bodily metaphors at the heart of the exhibition, unfolding around the question of “to take root or to decay?” Oil paintings and objects that spill beyond the pictorial surface, such as gardens, domino tiles, punching bags, and telephone receivers, invite the viewer into a multilayered game. In the garden, rows of domino tiles shift from their positions, growing seeds intertwine with images of sprouts, and the visual and conceptual relationships formed between metaphor and literal reality become entangled.
