Nevin Aladağ: "Neulich/Recently", Installation, Berlin/Nizza/Istanbul/Stuttgart, 1997/1998/2003/2011
Nevin Aladağ's "Back to First Position / Alles auf Anfang"
As a cultural observer with an artistic eye Berlin based artist Nevin Aladag investigates human settings and develops non-narrative stories, conceptual interactions and performative interventions. She is always interested in conditions of living together, sharing spaces, musical elements and rituals that connect people.
Aladag grew up in Stuttgart until her early twenties before going to the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. “Back to First Position / Alles auf Anfang” is her first major exhibition in her home city, Stuttgart. Aladag`s solo project at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart brings together a compilation of ideas, which come back to where they were first born or have their roots promising its title. The exhibition title is borrowed from an earlier installation (2007), shown at Berlinische Galerie, Berlin.
Revising the piece for the architectural structure at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Aladag installs motorcycle rear-view mirrors engraved with extracts of lyrics from different German and English songs. The installation creates a dynamic route in the exhibition space, and proposes a link to the physical experience of driving meanwhile listening to these songs.
In Aladag`s video piece "Lowrider Bellydance" (2004) two boys play with toy cars, and due to the Oriental music playing in the video, the cars can be directly associated with belly dancers. A toy car is mostly recognized as an instrument identifying with masculinity for boys, and in this video, the toy cars adopt posing macho behavior in terms of defining their territory. The music reconstructs this gender code creating irony on how gender roles are reproduced in society. Bringing formal aspects of any basketball playground with different forms of carpets, Nevin Aladag designs another conceptual crash between diverse cosmologies of culture. “Pattern Matching” (2010) is a collage of elements from various oriental carpets that represent the archetypical commercial product from Middle East, whereas it reflects the borders and patterns of basketball, a North American invention and one of the most famous sports exported from the USA.
For the video installation “Hochparterre [Mezzanine]” (2009) Aladag spoke with the residents of Naunynstrasse from Kreuzberg, Berlin, and the result is an edited video as an assemblage of many voices that are play backed or re-performed by an actress looking through the window. As a collage of public statements or short stories, it creates a conceptual base for developing a collective and poetic text about the city, its hidden history and subconscious memory. As the first part of a series of video works, “City Language I” (2009) is an audio-visual postcard, capturing İstanbul through the interactions of musical instruments with the wind, water, architecture and pigeons. As an orchestral collage of different sound-samples from traditional instruments with an artistic approach of experimenting on how everyday life and urban reality sound in Istanbul, the work portraits the physicality of living in the city as a soundsscape.
“Voice over" (2006) depicts a drum in the middle of a park in Winter when it is raining. The photographic image represents a fragment that is not only an image, but also an image that represents sound. Looking at the drum under the raindrops brings allows us to imagine the sound from the rain that falls on the drum. Another installation that silently represents the physicality of music, is reproduced for this show; “Ein bißchen Rock ́n` Roll, [A little bit of Rock ‘n’ Roll], (2001/2007). Different objects that you can find around at an after-hour party such as a broken mirror ball, an old guitar and used stockings come together to rock ‘n’ roll.
Her outdoor installation “Recently” is also reproduced for “Back to First Position / Alles Auf Anfang” after Istanbul, Berlin and Nice –but this time, it can be considered as a direct reference to Stuttgart’s socio-economical profile. Considering the location of Künstlerhaus Stuttgart in Stuttgart West, and its neighbors such as offices, banks and business school, and its history as a factory, “Recently” urgently communicates with outside, with the street, with the city as an ironic monument of risk and failure with its direct references, which are custom-made materials such as a suit sewn together with a shirt, a tie and shoes hanging upside down as a public sculpture.
During the process of an intense dialogue with the team working at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, and after several research visits to Stuttgart, Aladag has clearly taken the production process of her solo exhibition, “Back to First Position / Alles Auf Anfang” as an opportunity to develop a monographic perspective on her practice in collaboration with Adnan Yildiz. The selected works, their reproduction and installation have been based on defining basic tracks and significant directions in her work.
Aladag positions the exhibition space as a studio where she can continue her conceptual experiments with diverse materials; her poetic language, and the documentary value in her work are uniquely combined together in this show to invite the audience to look at the works at the city –where they were created.
KÜNSTLERISCHE DIALOGE I: Şener Özmen und Nevin Aladağ
Ausstellung 21. April 2011 - 29. Mai 2011
Şener Özmen: Die Geschichte von Şener Özmen
Nevin Aladağ: Alles auf Anfang
