Taking place between February 3 and April 24, 2020, Homeostasis, curated by Naz Beşcan, imagines Galeri 5 as a healing space through the works of Luna Ece Bal, Patricia Domínguez, Serra Duran Paralı and Melike Koçak.
Homeostasis refers to the processes and operations that help an entity to keep its internal balance regardless of the external factors. The term that is commonly used for the physical and chemical balance of our bodies may also define certain features of human psychology, a machine, ecology or a society. We can think of homeostasis as momentary self-recoveries of a being or a formation for connecting back to its essence.
Homeostasis investigates the instabilities that might have been caused by the office building, the neighborhood and the city, Istanbul that the gallery space is situated in. The traffic may exhaust us, our backs may hurt on the chair we sit the whole day, and the noise may blur our perception. The exhibited works at Homeostasis, critically engages with these moments in which our internal balance is disturbed or our compass go astray. They at times establish them as moments of healing and at other point at alternative ways of healing.
Luna Ece Bal designs a scent that might belong to the grand piano at the gallery space. This work that we can smell but can’t see, aims to remind the viewer the essence of the wood, the state that the piano was in before the fabrication processes it went through. Bal’s satin works that experiment with the traditional Turkish art ebru, a healing ritual itself, accompany the piano and softly touch upon the concepts of universe, existence, fertility and femininity.
The prints by Chilean artist Patricia Domínguez tries to heal the performance centred society of contemporary times. Focusing on the clash of different economies, Domínguez makes the connections to colonization visible and aims to heal its ongoing wounds with more traditional approaches. Domínguez’s societal observations in Chile are reflected to Galeri 5 as suffering white-collar workers. These figures applying Pre-Colombian ceramic artifacts for their back pain and hurting joints direct us towards a deeper wound: Would going back to our roots and remembering where we came from heal us?
Serra Duran Paralı’s video work, Present Tense, 2020, produced for Homeostasis switches the concepts of internal and external through a experiential examination of the gallery’s building and asks how the balance shifts when the sounds from the outside of the space are moved inside. Through her dark humor, Duran Paralı collides the moments that we conform to the speed of the city, system and technological status quo we live in with what arises during her personal practice of looking inside.
The photo-zine Melike Koçak released in 2018, Sometimes I Feel Like a Potato Bag Under the Ocean, takes the form of an installation for Homeostasis. Given the assignment to document the longest bus ride of Istanbul, 500T Koçak’s photographic research corresponds with the artist’s own fight for her mental health. Formed around the photographs for the assignment, Koçak’s personal search for healing becomes a story of its own.
Luna Ece Bal (b. 1992, Izmir) is continuing her studies to obtain her Master of Fine Arts Degree at École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, after completing a BA on Film and Digital Arts at Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne University. Her works, which offer a healing session through macro and micro cosmic formations practiced using mainly natural ingredients that is emotionally charged, forms a notable tie between witchcraft, alchemy and modern science.
Serra Duran Paralı (b. 1993, Istanbul) is a multi-disciplinary artist working on various personal and commissioned projects, mainly focused on film. Paralı graduated from Koç University, Media and Visual Arts. Then she was awarded with a scholarship by the French government to study documentary film making at La Femis, Fondation Européenne pour les Métiers de l’Image et du Son, in Paris. She wrote and directed ‘THIS BRUTAL WORLD’, a short documentary about the sociological influences of brutalist architecture in Paris and ‘IT’S JUST’, a music video based on the feminist art movement, which is awarded as the best music video at Cannes Short Film Festival. She is currently represented by 85/90 projects as a filmmaker and visual artist.
Patricia Domínguez (b. 1984, Santiago, Chile) Bringing together an experimental research on ethnobotany, healing practices and the corporatization of wellbeing, her work focuses on the transference from colonial times to neoliberal practices of extraction and overworking. Recent solo exhibitions include There is nothing in the middle CentroCentro, Madrid; Planetary Tears, Yeh Art Gallery New York, (all 2020), Green Irises Gasworks, London (2019). Llanto Cósmico Twin Gallery, Madrid (2018), soñé@cerámicas Sala CCU, Santiago (2017); Eres un Princeso Pizzuti Collection Museum, Ohio; Los ojos serán lo último en pixelarse Galería Patricia Ready, Santiago; and Focus Latinoamérica, ARCO Madrid (all 2016). Recent group exhibitions include Momenta Biennale de l´imagen, Montreal, Canada, The trouble is staying, Meet Factory, Prague (both 2019), What is going to happen is not ‘the future’, but what we are going to do’, ARCO Madrid; Working for the Future Past, SEMA, Seoul (both 2018), Apocalypse Me, Emila Filli Gallery, Usti nad Labem; Cantos de Tarapacá, CCE Santiago, 8000 años después, Galería Liberia (all 2017). She earned her MFA from Hunter College New York and a Botanical Illustration Certificate from the New York Botanical Garden. She was a recipient of Beca AMA (2017), 2nd Beca CCU (2015), Media Art Prize from Fundación Telefónica and 3rd Norberto Griffa Prize (both 2014). She runs the experimental ethnobotanical platform Studio Vegetalista.
Melike Koçak was born in 1997, in Istanbul. She is a photographer who currently studies philosophy. In her photographic practice, she tries to reveal the surreal elements in our daily lives and compose a narrative from them in photo series and zines. She publishes Fabrika Zine since 2015, aiming to create a platform for emerging Turkish photographers
Naz Beşcan (b.1993, Istanbul) is a curator working and living in Istanbul. After studying International Relations at Koç University, Istanbul, she completed her MA in Curating Contemporary Art at Royal College of Art, London in 2018. With her dissertation titled In Foreign Land: The Global Exhibition, The Foreign Curator and The Romanticised Local” she received the merit of distinction. During the summer of 2018, she participated in the NEON Curatorial Exchange program funded by Whitechapel Gallery. Currently, she works at Zilberman–Istanbul as the Program