Ten years after his last solo show at Galeri Bosfor in Istanbul, Turkey, Visual Arts alumnus Barış Göktürk ’20 has returned with Scanner / Tarayan, an exhibition featuring his painting and sculpture works.
Scanner / Tarayan is on view until October 28, 2023 and accents the subtle aspects underlying Göktürk’s artistic practice, such as his concern with the “multi-layered relationship between the body of the individual and the body determined and reshaped by power.”
In this iteration of works that investigate the body politic, Göktürk utilizes the concept of a scan, both literal (as in a scanner) and metaphorical (as in surveillance scanning). The paintings in this exhibition bear scanner-hued strips of light either next to or imposed above compressed and flattened renditions of hands, thighs, and torsos, making for a pictorial plane that converses with the body as a digitized form.
Set all around the gallery’s spacious rooms are severed portions of limbs—there are feet, feet and calves, feet and calves and knees and thighs—made out of wood, clay, and porcelain. The limbs, which are part of Göktürk’s Scanner series, serve as “a projection of a control-oriented” process of scanning a physical space “in an effort to find a place and direction of movement.” Some of the limbs move towards the paintings while others face decidedly away from them, resulting in a dynamic relationship between these two mediums—sculpture and painting.
Baris Gokturk was born in Ankara, Turkey. He was recently an ApexArt fellow in Seoul, artist-in-residence at YADDO, and a participant in SOMA Mexico as well as Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Recent museum exhibitions include Pera Museum in Istanbul and SECCA in Winston- Salem, NC. He recently completed a mural for Columbia University’s Butler Library and a commission by the Public Art Fund as part of Art on the Grid. He finished a residency at LMCC Governors Island in 2020, and his debut solo show in New York could be seen at Helena Anrather Gallery in November 2020. Gokturk is currently working on upcoming projects in New York, Venice, and Eskisehir, Turkey. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn.
