“For the first time, taking root was no longer being stuck in one place, but the feeling of being able to settle down simultaneously in many places at once, wherever she spread her seeds.”
— Duygu Demir
PARIS-B is delighted to welcome the artist Gözde Ilkin for her second solo show at the gallery, entitled «Invisible Bonds, Companion Roots», unveiling her latest group of works.
Gözde Ilkin has been working for fifteen years with found fabrics and embroidery. Through this handcrafted method, she engages in a critical approach to memory and history to deconstruct notions of gender, community, and forms of belonging.
In these series, the humanoid figures of her embroideries expand and interconnect like carnal roots or braided fibres in what seems to be an organic process of becoming rather than the ultra-capitalist notions of evolution and progress.
This is apparent in the layering of her textile drawings: the cloth pattern, the embroidered figures often overlapping each other, the plant extract expanding on the textile, and the interplay between both sides of the fabric, to name but a few.
“Instead of preserving, embellishing or domesticating things, the fabrics used by the artist are transformed into planes that reveal rather than cover; instead of hiding what is underneath, these surfaces draw attention to themselves. They function as signifiers of openness and vulnerability …
… I could sense that the figures that populated these fabrics, tied together through their faceless heads by gnarly nodes in the color of flesh, were meant to address familial situations and configurations that we either knew too well, or at least recognized from a distance. In these now familiar works by İlkin, the fabrics function both as subject and material: the lacework on a pillowcase, the embroidery on handmade curtains, the scalloped edges of a tablecloth, the needlework on a towel become the bearers of domestic memory when they are transformed by İlkin.”
— Duygu Demir
Her drawings gradually developed a metaphorical quality, whereby the human body is associated with other entities, human and non-human. Ilkin engages in a deep re-evaluation of values, beliefs, and personal stories through slow-making, sometimes with collaborators, including her mother.
Indeed, collectivity is important for the artist, from the making of the fabrics to the exhibition space, where she often works with choreographers, curators, and dancers.
Ilkin’s second individual exhibition at PARIS-B gallery, is part of the Entrusted Grounds series of exhibitions and events. This iteration is titled Invisible Bonds, Companion Roots, thus expressing the complex interweaving socio-politics of an ecosystem.
Entrusted Grounds thus invites the viewer to consider the exhibition as an immersive experience rather than a critical evaluation. Hence, its first iteration at artSümer gallery in Instanbul presented embroidered fabrics, suspended modular interactive sculptures, performance and sound to create a tridimensional ‘landscape’. It enriched an art history genre, the landscape, by using landforms as an approach to the exhibition space, for instance. Here, the cave was the framework for the installation as a real space where humans first interacted with the world through drawing, and as a metaphor.
The sand dune will be the new framework to approach the exhibition space. This powerful metaphor talks about the nomadic quality of both geology and concepts: a dune moves and is reshaped by the wind, the critters living in it, and the quality of its material, the sand, a powerful symbol of time. But it may also be created by our presence on earth and our interaction with it.
As in the first iteration of the project in Istanbul, The Entrusted Ground, Ilkin will present the beautiful sketches she makes for each installation.
“When the knots we form with habits and ossified patterns are broken; when we allow unsettling changes to happen, an unexpected life can unfold. The solution can sometimes come from an unfamiliar moment and place.”
— Gözde İlkin
BIOGRAPHY
Gözde ĺlkin was born in 1981 in Kütahya (Turkey). She studied painting at the Fine Arts Faculty of Mimar Sinan University and is pursuing a master’s degree at Marmara University in Istanbul. She lives and works in Istanbul.