Art On Istanbul welcomes its visitors to Ekin Kano's solo exhibition "Between Rock And a Hard Place" between December 14, 2024, and January 11, 2025, at Art On Istanbul Piyalepaşa.
The exhibition features paintings, prints, and ceramic sculptures created by the artist in Istanbul and Paris. Through her works, Kano invites the audience into unsettling spaces, exploring the ambiguous boundaries between the human and the non-human. Addressing themes of porosity and permeability, the exhibition is the outcome of a research project that examines the permeable borders between landscapes, bodies, and various existential states. Inspired by the physical relationship with the ground, Kano delves into the physical and metaphorical dimensions of permeability in her artworks.
The concept of "porous becoming," associated with contemporary philosopher Michel Serres, signifies a refusal to impose boundaries on disciplines, thoughts, and spacetime, fostering fluid transitions along channelswithout shutting down conversations along the lines of arbitrary categories. This kind of permeability creates new connections rather than descending into unproductive chaos, offering freedom to discover new paths through intellectual figures. Porous boundaries provide movement, flux, and interplay between the biological and the social.
Serres states, ""Whatever the activity you are involved in, the body remains the medium of intuition, memory, knowing, working, and above all invention." ([1999] 2011, 34)1. To him, the body exists as the foundation of knowing, sensing, and doing, but it is not an impenetrable structure; it is porous. We move within the world, reconstruct it, and expand it. Serres is captivated by the complex relationship between life and death, the flows of energy and knowledge, and the dynamics that produce human worlds. Following in Serres's footsteps, Ekin Kano "wanders in the world and the back worlds, in bold abstraction, landscapes, cultures and languages" ([1991] 1997, 32)2. She stands at the threshold between life and death, immersing her body and gaze into the pores of life. Her technique transforms with hesitation and openness to the adventure of learning things anew each day. Her works create a contact zone between the individual's personal experience and the ever-evolving universe, touching on other forms of knowledge, emotions, textures, and the atmospheres of life. The ambiguous body forms featured in this exhibition resonate as both felt presences and spaces of folds, proximities, penetrations, and mixtures. This resonance also points to the states of breathing of various bodies, interpreting respiration as "the principle of a regulating alternation from which the process of the world flows"3.
1 Serres, Michel. (1999) 2011. Variations on the Body. Minneapolis: Univocal
2 Serres, Michel. (1991) 1997. The Troubadour of Knowledge. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser and William Paulson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
3 Jullien, François. 2012. The Great Image Has No Form, or On the Nonobject through Painting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press Exhibition
Text: Ezgi Hamzaçebi
