Art On Istanbul presents Onur Mansız’s solo exhibition ERA at Art On Piyalepaşa from
November 4 – December 1.
In his works, Onur Mansız keeps the spiritual and the corporeal at a distance, attempting
to veil the tension between them. In this instinctive urge either to share or to withhold
emotion, what surfaces—often unknowingly—is precisely that which was meant to remain
hidden, where the presence of the agent comes alive. By placing sensation before thought,
soul before body, and nature before humanity, Mansız generates a new hybrid species out
of familiar landscapes. In doing so, he transforms space into an active agent, projecting
onto the viewer the spatial and temporal tensions that emerge between subject and
matter.
In this reconfigured hybridity, where the consciousness of nature is grafted onto the
subject, Mansız strips away emotion, gender, origin, system, and identity, suspending the
figure from the conventional imperatives of being human.
Over the course of history, the evolving relationship between humanity and nature has
reached a point of irreversible rupture with the onset of the Anthropocene. What was once
reverence for nature has been supplanted by the desire to dominate it. Disturbed by the
condition of being human, Mansız seeks purification through the very components of
nature. Yet in the midst of this process, the agent confronts him with a truth he had never
before perceived.
