She matches. A blue-haired 79-year-old sporting a neckline adorned with a chain mesh resembling repurposed plastic clips, Ipek Duben sits atop the Juma constructing in Karaköy behind glass home windows, comfortably adorned in a fuzzy, azure sweater. Hers is the artwork of a storied satirist, whimsical at coronary heart and on the floor, however tough across the edges when bristled. Her visible venom is transmuted into the spatial kinds of her plural paintings.
Far from self-conscious, but fully conscious of her environment, she workouts her herbal energy to decide on, as a girl, an artist and a human being, methods to mix and methods to stand out, not solely by means of the colours of her clothes but in addition relative to her environment, each sociopolitical and natural-material. She does so by the popularity and creation of distance from actuality by means of fantasy, situating inventive perspective aside from imaginary beings like angels and clowns.
A video performs on loop upon getting into Pi Artworks, the top-floor artwork gallery at Juma, its austere, concrete area flooded with daylight amid Istanbul’s prime core actual property. Duben puckers up in entrance of a mirror as she smears on lipstick to accent her whitened, wigged face. She has no drawback assuming the guise of a clown because it fits her light-hearted temperament, however when her newest works seem, her visionary sense of conceptual-aesthetic distinction comes into focus.
Under a modern voiceover, her earnest voice rings out loud and clear to declaim the rise of catastrophe capitalism as a twin-headed mythological monster whose quartet of eyes inflames media veils of ignorance that obscure the direct expertise of modern life and its tragedies. Her topics are hurricanes, floods, the arctic ice melting, rising temperatures and sea ranges, tsunamis, forest fires, volcanic explosions, aridity, famine, rising inequality and mass migrations.
Installation of her concepts
When the artist recites the litany of newsworthy causes, they one way or the other sound recent by means of her cautious, poised articulation that has been screened and put in with curatorial tact throughout the gallery flooring and alongside the in any other case crude partitions of Pi Artworks. With the boldness of her training as a political science scholar on the University of Chicago within the mid-1960s, she has the experiential pull of a thoughts that has pulled on the roots of the worldwide establishment.
And, using the mediums of the postcard and the {photograph}, flippantly embellishing them with wispy {decorations} of paint, she is ushering in a reevaluation of the prevailing world order by remodeling one of the fashionable West’s oldest traditions of expression and connection. Postcards are prototypical social media in that they image and date particular person and collective presence for the needs of broadcast, typically for private and leisure units.
The invisible minority of oligarchs sits enthroned beside the remaining, stressed and restive beneath the behemoth nodes of oppression that maintain individuals confined whereas forcing them out. The fortress Europe has made itself into a postmodern promised land, enclosed with a barbed cage towards which the darker and poorer strains of humanity cling and fall. Such scenes are in her work, “Moon 2” (2020), through which she juxtaposes unlawful migration with the moon touchdown.
“Moon 1” (2020) is equally coursed with visible perception into the quixotic gravity of earthling aspiration, which is unending in its method to the heights. At one finish, all 7.6 billion of the world’s inhabitants would have a life equal to that of their former Anglo-European masters, and on the opposite, worldly success is inadequate in a universe the place undiscovered planets await colonization. Crouched on the crescent moon, witnessing Neil Armstrong’s small step, Duben clowns round.
Rereading picture for language
In 1976, Duben had switched from a profession in politics in America to the world of artwork. That yr, she earned a BFA in studio apply on the New York Studio School and planted roots in Soho, “when it was nonetheless Soho,” she says with a wry, realizing grin. In 1994, with the rise Turkey’s ruling occasion in Istanbul, she had a solo present in a storefront gallery in Taksim. She was one of the final native artists to show herself so fully naked in a public cultural discussion board.
That early work seems in her piece, “Monument” (2020), a paean to the excessive arts of antiquity, notably sculptural celebrations of the human physique. She profiled herself from raised arms to straightened legs like an Egyptian goddess under an architectural body out of a Pharaonic temple. In the identical collage, she portrays the unspeakable vandalization of historic masterpieces of marble, in honor of superb femininity in its shapely marvel.
Preceded by well-earned worldwide status, nevertheless modest a colourful persona she assumes, Duben is a cautious, self-curating set up artist. “Angels and Clowns” is ready inside a baroque design of deep crimson wallpaper, textured with floral patterns like in a Victorian mansion. Two ornamental, elegantly armed and gilded chairs are fastened within the corners of the gallery, as if out of the 18th century.
And draped over the ground, a Turkish rug is topped with an vintage mannequin turtle, one thing maybe alluding to the masked balls of the previous Ottoman palace, whereby transferring candles lit the salons and ballrooms hooked up to the shells of dwelling turtles, who it may be presumed will need to have walked into not a few blazing crinolined petticoats. The environment are from a time as baroque in its profusion because the cities of her portraiture: New York and Istanbul.
Tale of two megalopolises
The seraphim of Hagia Sophia disrobe of their feathered shrouds, morph into cherubim and descend from the celestial ceiling of the mosque-cathedral-museum to gentle the town. First, one of the winged angelic infants touches the tip of the Maiden’s Tower. It is a component of Duben’s piece, “Istanbul 1” (2020). Throughout the watery vistas of the huge metropolitan space, the heavenly cherubs fly, enlightening just like the mahya artwork of stringed bulbs of phrases tied to minarets.
In her work “Istanbul 2” (2020), she quotes Orhan Veli, who wrote one of the preferred poems about Istanbul, “Istanbul’u Dinliyorum” (“I’m Listening to Istanbul”). And pasting out the legendary phrasing, phrase by phrase, from discovered fonts and different clippings, the infamous crowds of Istiklal Avenue march, shop-happy, inside the interstices between an excerpt of the poem: “I’m listening to Istanbul, intent, my eyes closed / At first there’s a mild breeze … ”
Perhaps probably the most pressing, historic and tough of Duben’s works seems in her piece “Model 2” (2020). It is the second half of a collection on the feminine physique. One of the postcard-shaped additions is a newsflash. A younger woman suffered mortal punishment of her household within the identify of honor. The topic is a matter Duben tackled together with her works, “LoveBook” and “LoveGame” (1998-2000).
With crucial items in some of the highest-profile artwork collections on this planet, together with on the British Museum, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Istanbul Modern, the Vienna Museum and the Center for Book Arts in New York, Duben is a formidable presence in Istanbul for now and all the time. Her artwork, and her persona, nevertheless, are approachable, and even thrilling, evoking the feeling of getting that postcard within the mail from distant solely to study the world has shrunk.
