Ülgen Semerci’s solo exhibition “Do I Contradict Myselves?” is titled after Daisy Hildyard's
2018 talk appropriating the prominent Walt Whitman poem “Song of Myself”. Whitman
writes;
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
The works in the exhibition are rooted in Semerci's dreams from the past two years in
which different persons; existing, imagined, missed, feared, from the past or present
become active agents, intersect, and become one another. Although we speak of a self, we
cannot think of the individual as an isolated entity. Karen Barad proposes the term intraaction
for bodies, both human and non-human, in action with one another.
Intra-action doesn't understand agency as an inherent individualistic property, but as a
dynamism of forces.
Semerci aims to look both inward and outward, overlapping the microcosm and the
macrocosm, attempting to experience interconnections and intra-connections and
perceiving the self relationally. ,