“Sampling” is a surprising exhibition, in terms of both context and content. Organized by locus athens, a recently founded nonprofit arts organization, and featuring seven Turkish artists, the exhibition is housed in the Plaka neighborhood home of Angeliki Hadjimichali, one of the major collectors of Greek folk art. Designed to reflect her personality, the building is a combination of a clean, modernist structure and regional details. It is precisely this blend of styles that makes this an apt venue for the collaborative written installation by Germany-based artists Özlem Günyol and Mustafa Kunt’s Avrupalilastirabildiklerimizdenmisiniz? (Are you one of those that we could get Europeanized?), 2006, displayed on the building’s facade. Naturally, the dialogue between personal and national identities underlies the rest of the exhibition: On one end, Köken Ergun’s disturbing video Flag, 2006, portrays primary school children immersed in state ideology during the celebration of one of Turkey’s anniversaries; on the other, Leyla Gediz’s beautiful, seemingly abstract paintings seem painfully fragile and intimate. Oscillating between the two, Kurdish artist Cengiz Tekin’s photographs “uncover” evidence of the mechanisms deployed in state and family oppression in national traditions and local agendas.
This is not a brash exhibition, although some of the works here might be described as such. However, even though it does not strive to produce a cohesive, totalizing view of art produced in Turkey, “Sampling” is a rather cohesive exhibition in itself, one that hints at the possibility of several coexistent ways of living well beyond the usual postmodern rhetoric of “difference.”
