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Yasemin İmre on Flash Freak, 2024 [EN]

Preoccupied with the rapidity of the festival format, Cem Örgen’s exhibition Flash Freak for Les Urbaines 2024 presented works that ruminate on both the material and conceptual conduits of speediness. For Örgen, the speed at which we rush through experiences compromises their integrity—and yet, as the main pace of the work imposed on him (sometimes by himself), he finds himself caught between losing integrity for the sake of speed and finding ways to encapsulate memories that would otherwise be lost in the rush.

Upon entering Flash Freak, our eyes and movements are guided by illuminated fiber optic cables, materials designed to transmit data at the fastest speed possible. These cables either swivel around or pierce through the works, connecting the installation into a network of memories in flux. Each work in the exhibition sources its own light, serving not only as a conduit for its own data but also as the primary illumination for the exhibition space. Örgen employs rapid documentation methods: X-rays of the bones of loved ones, captured in an instant with a flash; MRI scans that section the body to inspect hidden complications; and illustrations on children’s drawing tablets, which can be erased at the touch of a button. Here, the speed of capture is equal to the speed of erasure, which is equal to the multiplication of memory by the negative of preservation. 

The structure of each sculpture responds to this rhythm, created for the purpose of fragmentation and unification. Each piece is designed to take up little space and remain lightweight while traveling, achieving its integrity when stationed and assembled. “Cem Sleeps Vertically”, perched by the door, is a transport box— the very container in which the entire exhibition arrived and the one into which it will be packed again once disassembled. It is an object that marks both arrival and departure: hello and goodbye.

Speed is both a force of compression and dispersion, a mechanism that captures and obliterates. Örgen does not attempt to halt this momentum but instead creates a system where memory, material, and movement coexist in a fragile equilibrium. As the exhibition dissolves back into its transport box, its traces linger in the afterimage of glowing cables and the fleeting impressions of bodies, structures, and sketches.


Aslı Seven on Risk of Rain, 2024 [EN]

Entitled Risk of Rain, the exhibition explores intertwined materialities of water, desire, heartbreak and material production processes through a series of works-as-bodies, which appear as at once organic and artificial, spanning sculpture, drawing, assemblage, text and sound.

A meteorological possibility underlies the exhibition. As desire, heartbreak and trauma manifest themselves through bodily fluids; atmospheric transformations, biological bodies, industrial processes and optical devices become affective subjects on the verge of making it rain. Or, on the verge of creating a momentary focus in our distracted, dopamine-addicted present. Arising from the global urge and desire to find what and who you love under these circumstances, the sculptures in the exhibition each elaborate on a selected moment of focus under conditions of distraction, around the possibility of romantic love, affective states in an everyday family gathering, the softness of a wound or around moments of epiphany in the artistic process. 

A relatively small and seemingly simple steel sculpture is placed at the center of the exhibition. Its shape is reminiscent of a designer chair but obfuscates any compatibility with the sitting human form. The function is dislocated yet the metaphor is active, as in mounting a horse: it is titled Horses. When seen from the perspective of the small piece of Tyvek paper hanging on it, displaying a hand made copy of the Faber Castell logo, it becomes a frame. Breaking the horse, training living matter, taming your own body: an archeology of making and of industrial production capitalizing on material, emotional, organic and cultural resources across centuries can begin here. Friction and adaptation are central in this and many other works on display: the drawing was made using the transfer technique, applying pressure between two surfaces and pushing a color pencil across the paper. Friction creates the trace, as much as it provokes erasure. Same can be said of Breakfast with Family, one of the larger installation pieces, where erosion becomes central, as a metaphor for memory embodied by the material, in this case, wood: painted, perforated, scraped, carved out, filled up and varnished. Much like the artist’s intentionally amateur sewing and clumsy stitches that cover the surfaces of bags and of the silicone suture kits reaching out from the mechanical body of Open Surgery: An inventory of different shapes of wounds on soft tissue, fillings and stitches over scar tissue. In Cem’s works matter and material processes stand for layers of collective and individual trauma, sediment after sediment. Can love and contingency ever be compatible? He mentions in passing “the truth that when love is conditional, our hearts will be unconditionally broken”. Am I In Love features twin little monsters, fire, danger and deflection as much as it conveys warmth and light, millions of little suns our iphones are. Love remains a question, never becomes a statement. Its simple possibility, as in real life intimacy, is quickly overturned by defensive tactics, scary posturing and irony, all characteristic features of online and parasocial relationships.

There are attempts to collect a momentary focus and form, often through the presence of a liquid process. In Breakfast with Family this comes in the form of acrylic water lenses through which a series of five photographic prints come to view. The water lens creates an interplay of scale within the photographic image, reliant on the viewer’s movements and animates the image through this central tension: its focus keeps changing as you shift your position, and so does its relationship to the rest of the exhibition space, momentarily reflecting through the body of water encapsulated within the acrylic porthole. In another instance, Open Surgery is half surrounded by a glass structure carrying its own evaporation metaphor, much like in a condensation cube or a heated aquarium, the glass surface is obscured by an accumulation of matter. While the fluid in Breakfast with Family serves as an optical device, here its shading effect comes as a protective layer in support of the mechanical body it shelters. Occultation might be a necessity when it comes to focus. The barely discernible magnetic drawing in Omnipotent is an underwater self portrait trickstering through the conductivity of water and lightning to describe a moment of artistic epiphany, on the verge of drowning.

[TR]

Serginin temelinde meteorolojik bir olasılık yatıyor. Arzu, kalp kırıklığı ve travma bedensel sıvılar aracılığıyla kendini gösterirken; atmosferik dönüşümler, biyolojik bedenler, endüstriyel süreçler ve optik cihazlar yağmur yağdırmanın, ya da dikkati dağılmış, dopamin bağımlısı bir ortamda anlık bir odak yaratmanın eşiğinde duran duyarlı özneler haline geliyor. Bu koşullar altında neyi ve kimi sevdiğini bulmaya yönelik küresel dürtü ve arzudan doğan sergideki heykellerin her biri, sürekli dikkat dağınıklığı koşulları altında, romantik aşk olasılığı, gündelik bir aile toplantısındaki duygusal durumlar, bir yaranın yumuşaklığı veya sanatsal süreçteki aydınlanma anları etrafında seçilmiş odak anlarını ele alıyor.

Nispeten küçük ve basit görünen çelik bir heykel serginin merkezinde yer alıyor. Biçimi bir tasarım sandalyesini andırıyor ancak oturan insan formuyla herhangi bir uyumluluğun inkarında. İşlev kaybolmuş ancak metafor ata binme eyleminde olduğu gibi aktif: İş “Atlar” başlığını taşıyor. Üzerinde Faber Castell logosunun elle yapılmış bir kopyasını sergileyen küçük Tyvek kağıt parçasının perspektifinden bakıldığında, bir çerçeveye dönüşüyor. Atı dizginlemek, canlı maddeyi eğitmek, kendi bedenini evcilleştirmek: yüzyıllar boyunca maddi, duygusal, organik ve kültürel kaynaklardan yararlanan bir yapım ve endüstriyel üretim arkeolojisi burada başlayabilir. Sürtünme ve uyumlanma bu ve sergilenen diğer birçok çalışmanın merkezinde yer alıyor: çizim, iki yüzey arasında basınç uygulayarak, renkli bir kalemi kağıt üzerinde iterek elde edilen transfer tekniği kullanılarak üretilmiş. Sürtünme, silmeye neden olduğu kadar izi de yaratır. Aynı şey, malzemenin, bu durumda ahşabın, boyanmış, delinmiş, kazınmış, oyulmuş, doldurulmuş ve cilalanmış haliyle somutlaşan hafızanın bir metaforu olarak erozyonun merkeze yerleştiği büyük enstalasyon parçalarından biri olan “Aileyle Kahvaltı” için de söylenebilir. Tıpkı sanatçının “Açık Ameliyat “ın mekanik gövdesinden uzanan silikon dikiş takımlarının ve çantaların yüzeylerini kaplayan kasten amatörce attığı dikişler gibi: Yumuşak doku üzerinde farklı biçimlerde yaralar, yara dokusu üzerinde dolgular ve dikişlerden oluşan bir envanter. Cem’in işlerinde madde ve maddi süreçler, kolektif ve bireysel travma katmanlarını temsil ediyor. Sevgi ve olasılık hesapları birbiriyle bağdaşabilir mi? “ Sevgi koşullu olduğunda, kalplerimizin koşulsuz olarak kırılacağı gerçeğinden” bahsediyor. “Yoksa aşık mıyım?” ikiz küçük canavarları, ateşi, tehlikeyi ve yön saptırmayı içerdiği kadar sıcaklık ve ışığı, telefonlarımızın milyonlarca küçük güneşini de içeriyor. Aşk bir soru olarak kalır, asla bir beyana dönüşmez. Salt olasılığı bile, tıpkı gerçek hayattaki yakınlıkta olduğu gibi, çevrimiçi ve parasosyal ilişkilerin karakteristik özellikleri olan savunma taktikleri, korkutucu duruş ve ironi tarafından hızla altüst edilir. 

Çoğunlukla maddenin halleri arasında gezinen bir sürecin üzerinden anlık odak ve biçim toplama girişimleriyle karşı karşıyayız. “Aile ile Kahvaltı” adlı iş, akrilik su mercekleri aracılığıyla görüntülenen beş fotoğraf baskısından oluşuyor. Su merceği, izleyicinin hareketlerine bağlı olarak fotografik görüntü içinde bir ölçek etkileşimi yaratıyor ve görüntüyü bu merkezi gerilim aracılığıyla canlandırıyor: izleyen konumunu değiştirdikçe görüntünün odağı da değişiyor ve sergi alanının geri kalanıyla ilişkisi de dalgalanıyor, anlık olarak akrilik lombozun içine hapsedilmiş su kütlesinden serginin bütünü yansıyor. Bir başka örnekte, “Açık Ameliyat”, kendi buharlaşma metaforunu taşıyan cam bir yapıyla yarı yarıya çevrili; tıpkı bir yoğuşma küpünde veya ısıtılmış bir akvaryumda olduğu gibi, cam yüzey bir madde birikimi tarafından örtülüyor. “Aile ile Kahvaltı “daki sıvı optik bir aygıt işlevi görürken, buradaki buğulandırma etkisi, barındırdığı mekanik bedeni destekleyen koruyucu bir katman olarak ortaya çıkıyor. Odaklanma söz konusu olduğunda gizlilik bir gereklilik olabilir. “Omnipotent”’teki zar zor fark edilen manyetik çizim, su ve şimşeğin iletkenliğiyle sihir yapan bir sualtı otoportresidir, boğulmanın eşiğindeki bir sanatsal aydınlanma anını betimler. 


Somut Bir Pop Destan, Murat Alat, 2024 [TR]

Damarlarımda kara safra dolaşıyor bugün. Hava bulutlu. Yağmur yağabilir. Nefes aldığımda atmosferdeki nem ciğerlerime doluyor. Ruhuma su katılıyor, dünya ile hemhal oluyorum. Nicedir hayat düz bir çizgide akmaktan vazgeçti benim için. Her şey aynı anda olup bitiyor, her şey bana eşit uzaklıkta. Bir olay diğerine bağlanmıyor, beni geçmişten uzaklaştırmıyor, geleceğe taşımıyor. Hayat kopuk kopuk parçalar bütünü. Engin, eşsiz bir şimdide asılı kaldım. Ölüm de doğum da ihtimal dâhilinde. Hayır, bu karamsar bir yazı olmayacak. Yaşadığımı her zerremde hissediyorum. Çok şükür ki ölüyorum.

Cem Örgen’i neredeyse sergilemeye ilk başladığı günlerden beri, hüznün eşlikçisi olduğu bir heyecanla takip ediyorum. Örgen’in işleri bir yandan bana yavaş yavaş yaşlandığımı, yeni bir varoluş kipinin çevremi sardığını haber veriyor, öte yandan belki de doğduğum gün içime çöreklenmiş ziyadesiyle çağdışı dekadan ruh halimin katran kıvamındaki yoğunluğunu taze bir bakışın ufkunda çözüyor. Ortasına düştüğüm dünyanın yapaylığından, özgünlüğün hiçbir yerde bulunmadığından şikayet ederek geçmişken yıllarım, Örgen vesilesiyle yaşam, kendine has olan, en ummadığım yerde karşıma çıkarıyor. Seri üretimin başka zaman olsa kitsch diye yaftalamaktan geri duramayacağım basit malzeme dağarcığı Örgen’in işlerinde özgünce canlanıyor. Ben robotlar da rüya görecek mi diye dertlenirken Örgen alelade bir inşaat malzemesinin bile özgür irade sahibi olduğunu bana ispat ediyor. Ereği sonsuzluk olan otobanın dışına yuvalanmış, haritalandırılmasına ihtimal veremediğim bir düzlükte daha önce hiç var olmamışçasına var hissedilebileceğime iman ediyorum. Bu kıyamet sonrası edebiyatının bir türlü hesap edemediği bir gelecek.

Kumlama aluminyum, polietilen köpük, kontrplak, epoksi, kağıt, silikon, iPhone, kontrol kalemi, saat vidaları, su merceği… Cem Örgen’in Yağmurun Riski adlı sergisi gündelik hayatta ulvi amaçlara koşulan sıradan araçlar olmaktan başka yazgısı bulunmayan envai nesneye adanmış bir şiir. Örgen, bu nesnelere ne modern bir tanrı gibi can üflüyor ne de gaipten haber alan bir ilahmışçasına ezoterik anlamlar yüklüyor, onları sadece içlerinden geçen pragmatik ilişkiler ağının cenderesinden çıkarıyor ve bu şeyler kendiliğinden canlanıverip kendi kendilerine, kendi adlarına hareket etmeye başlıyor. Kendinde şey Yağmurun Riski’nin baş aktörü. 

Nesneleri özgürleştirmek, kendinde şeyi sahneye çıkarabilmek adına Yağmurun Riski’nde sanatın repertuarındaki taktiklerden sakınıyor Örgen. Bu sergi yaratıcı bir sanatçının iç dünyasının dışa vurumu olmadığı gibi bir kavramsal çerçevenin gölgesinde örgütlenen fikirlerden, nesnelerden de ibaret değil. İlişkiler, ağlar bu sergide de mevcut lâkin bu bağıntıları koşullayan aşkın bir söylemin izi hiçbir yerde yok. Gündelik hayatın şiirsel olmayan kırık dökük şiirselliğini yakalamaya çalışan neo-epik bir şairin kelimelerle kurduğu muhabbeti nesnelerle kurarak sanatla edebiyat arasında bir koya demir atıyor Örgen. Velhasıl, bütün sergi de teknik olarak birbirine sıkı sıkıya bağlı işlerin hayat kadar geniş, handiyse sınırsız bir düzlükte birbirlerine gevşekçe örülmesinden müteşekkil çok parçalı bir destana dönüşüyor. Bu mütevazı destanın kahramanlarından biri de elbette sanatçının kendisi, zira işler onun ailesiyle yaptığı kahvaltı gibi naçizane bir deneyiminden ya da gönül ilişkilerine dair hislerinden pay alıyor; yine de başrol daha ilk anda türlü nesneyle paylaşılıyor, nihai form bu ilişkisellikte vücut buluyor. Galerinin duvarına folio kesimle aktarılan, sergiyi açıklamaktansa sergideki nesnelere eklemlenen kısa ve hayli puslu bir metnin satır aralarıyla işlerin, ince bir çerçeve olmanın ötesine özel bir ihtimamla geçmeyen adlarının ardında yiten sanatçı sergideki nesnelerden herhangi birine evriliyor. Sanatçıya atfetmeye alışık olduğumuz yaratıcılık gibi kudretli bir eylem böylece çeşit çeşit aktör arasında dalga dalga dağılıyor.

Bir şiire bağlanmak için şiirin ardındaki hikayeye nasıl ihtiyaç duymuyorsam, Ece Ayhan’ı anlamak için Çanakkaleli Melahat’ın kim olduğunu bilmem nasıl gerekmiyorsa, Yağmurun Riski’ndeki işlerle karşılaştığımda da bu işlerin ortaya çıkmalarına vesile olan süreçlerin bilgisine ihtiyaç duymuyorum. Yağmurun Riski’nde bütün muhtemel kurgular salt nesneler özgürleşsin diye işe koşulmuş birer araçtan ibaret. Amaçlar ve araçlar yer değiştiriyor. Öncül bağıntılar, bir kere söz konusu nesneler serbest kaldı mi geri çekilip önemini yitiriyor. Karşımda hiç ummadığım, hiç bilmediğim biçimde ışıldayan, birbirleriyle terütaze bir estetik düzlemde özgürce oynayan nesneler zuhur ediyor. Bu canlılık bana da bulaşıyor, üzerimdeki ölü toprağını silkeliyorum.

Şiir ile Yağmurun Riski arasında kurduğum ve kalbimi güm güm çarptıran irtibat pek de keyfe keder değil aslında. Galeriye daha adımımı atar atmaz karşılaştığım, serginin nüvesini barındıran, adeta sergi içinde bir sergi olan Pop adlı yerleştirme bu görüme koltuk çıkıyor. Alüminyumdan imal edilmiş, üzerindeki tüm kablolarla birlikte galerinin epoksi zemininden pop diye fışkıran bir su kaynağını andıran sıkı heykelin içine gömülü ekranda dönen, sanatçının atölyesinin kaydından mürekkeb video ve bu videoya eşlik eden, Örgen’in yazıp, dillendirip, düzenlediği, ilk duyduğum andan beri zihnimde dönüp duran, enerjik ve melankolik rap şarkısı sanatçının günümüz şiirinin çok da uzağında olmadığını nerdeyse kanıtlıyor. İyi bir rap’in yirmibirinci yüzyılın şiiri olduğuna çoktandır kaniyim. Örgen iyi rap yapıyor.

A Concrete Pop Saga, Murat Alat, 2024 [EN]

There is black bile in my veins today. The sky is cloudy. It might rain. When I breathe, the moisture in the air fills my lungs. My soul is hydrated—I am at one with the world. For some time now, life has stopped flowing in a straight line for me. Everything happens at once; everything is equidistant. One event does not lead to another, does not pull me from the past or carry me into the future. Life has become a collection of disconnected fragments. I am suspended in a vast, singular present. Death and birth are equally possible. But no, this will not be a pessimistic article. I feel alive in every fiber of my being, and—thank God—I am dying.

I have followed Cem Örgen’s work with an excitement tinged with sadness almost since his first exhibitions. On the one hand, his works remind me that I am slowly getting older, that a new mode of existence is encircling me. On the other, they dissolve the tar-like weight of my deeply anachronistic, decadent state of mind—a heaviness that may have settled in me the day I was born—offering instead the horizon of a fresh perspective. While I have spent years lamenting the artificiality of the world I have fallen into, the absence of originality anywhere, life, through Örgen, brings the unique to me where I least expect it. The simple material repertoire of mass production—what I might otherwise dismiss as kitsch—takes on an uncanny vitality in his hands. While I wonder if robots will ever dream, Örgen proves that even an ordinary construction material has a will of its own. Nestled off the highway whose goal is eternity, on a plain I cannot possibly map, I feel as if I have never existed before. This is a future post-apocalyptic literature has never been able to calculate.

Sandblasted aluminum, polyethylene foam, plywood, epoxy, paper, silicone, iPhone, control pen, watch screws, water lens... Cem Örgen’s exhibition The Risk of Rain is a poem dedicated to the overlooked, the objects condemned to the banality of utility. Yet Örgen does not act as a modern god breathing life into them, nor does he impose esoteric meanings as if they were sacred relics. He simply releases them from the web of pragmatic relationships that entrap them, allowing them to exist, move, and act in their own right. The thing-in-itself is the protagonist of The Risk of Rain.

To liberate objects—to bring the thing-in-itself to the forefront—Örgen deliberately avoids art’s familiar strategies. This exhibition is neither an expression of an artist’s inner world nor a conceptual arrangement of ideas and objects under a predefined framework. Relationships and networks are present, but without a transcendental discourse to condition them. The exhibition carves out a space between art and literature, where objects engage in the kind of conversation a neo-epic poet might have with words—an attempt to capture the fractured, unpoetic poetry of everyday life. The result is a sprawling, multi-part epic: technically tight yet loosely woven, as vast as life itself, almost limitless.

One of the protagonists of this humble saga is, of course, the artist himself. The works are inspired by his quiet moments—breakfast with family, reflections on love. Yet the lead role is shared with the objects from the outset, and the final form emerges through this relationality. The exhibition includes a short, hazy text, transferred onto the gallery wall in folio cut. Instead of explaining the works, it attaches itself to them. The artist, disappearing behind the names of his works—titles that are deliberately restrained—transforms into just another object in the exhibition. The creative force, which we are so accustomed to attributing solely to the artist, dissolves into waves, dispersing among various actors.

Just as I do not need to know the story behind a poem to connect with it, just as I do not need to know who Melahat of Çanakkale is to understand Ece Ayhan, I do not need to trace the origins of these works to experience them. In The Risk of Rain, all possible narratives serve only as tools for the liberation of objects. Ends and means switch places. A priori relationships retreat, losing their significance the moment these objects gain their freedom. I am confronted with materials that shine in unexpected ways, that play freely with one another on a fresh aesthetic plane. This vitality infects me. I shake off the dead soil.

The connection between poetry and The Risk of Rain, which makes my heart race, is no coincidence. The installation Pop, which I encounter as soon as I step into the gallery, serves as the exhibition’s nucleus—an exhibition within an exhibition. This work features a rotating aluminum video sculpture, cables exposed, embedded in a structure that resembles a gushing water spring emerging from the epoxy floor. Accompanying it is an energetic yet melancholic rap song—written, spoken, and arranged by Örgen himself. Since the first time I heard it, the song has been spinning in my mind, reaffirming something I have long believed: a good rap is the poetry of the twenty-first century. And Örgen raps well.


Ayşe Ertung on No Entry, 2022 [EN]

No Entry, contradicting its semantic nature, welcomes you with open arms via wiggly stainless pipes, crystal beads, snot, wigs and all sorts of accidental visual stimuli. Having the impenetrable in mind, Can Küçük and Cem Örgen penetrate hermetic areas of the mental abyss and the physical realm. With altered warning signs, obstacles, and even totems, they provide concrete and sincere narratives for taboo phenomena and situations. Following the natural flow of an intimate yet mundane conversation between friends, No Entry, dives deep into the personal but due to its wary disposition, chooses to re-emerge halfway, and floats instead. The conversation spreads out to the exhibition space as fragments of intimacy appear in various forms and conditions.

For each work by Can Küçük, there is a work by Cem Örgen complementing it, and vice versa. Objects remain loyal to their assigned tasks while refusing prohibitions of the status quo and lifting the boundaries of intimacy. Küçük and Örgen orchestrate subtle acts of trespass and disregard for the audience to undermine their rigid title, No Entry. By climbing up the artwork to see a two channel video, by lighting a wish candle or by accessing the gallery's storage space, the audience yield to this rupture. This way, not only the artists gain accomplices throughout the exhibition, but also, they discern and re-outline the eroded margins of impact of the warning sign “No Entry”.


Matt Hanson on You Can’t Hide in the Sky, 2021 [EN]

Downwind from the Aqueduct of Valens, built in the fourth century of the common era, there is a complex of breezy, multistory storefronts that make up one of the first experiments in strip mall architecture in Istanbul. Now flanked by swirling freeways, the capitalist optimism that ended 20th-century globalization with Americanized free market rule has been reduced to a whimper, as so many glass storefronts at the “Istanbul Drapers Market” (IMÇ) are blank with the smudge of tape detailing their abrupt closure, or slow reopening.

At the fifth block of IMÇ, a trio of young artists is sitting in conversation. Among them is Can Küçük, who is tasked with overseeing operations at 5533 for the first half of the year. Titled after the block number of the shop room where it is based, 5533 has the ambiance of a warehouse factory. Cem Örgen, who studied industrial product design, produced a diverse and ultramodern installation, “You Can’t Hide in the Sky,” incorporating computer games, camouflage painting and sculptural elements.

Küçük, whose works play on the histories and manufacturing of readymade art and decorative furniture, examines elements of the industrial environment in his practice. As a point of site-specific consciousness, he made a door ringer out of a hard-coiled metal spring which hangs from the ceiling behind the door to 5533, as it swings open to the sound of a spoon clanking out of an empty rectangle. The cold, metallic assemblage is prefatory to the works of “You Can’t Hide in the Sky,” which includes window blinds that resemble flat, model swords.

For the piece, “Weapon for Ephemeral Eyes,” Örgen laser-cut stainless steel into the shape of a body-length medieval saber, which inconspicuously functions as vertical blinds and stands in direct, visual dialogue with a variegated work, “Case, Keyboard, Winter,” in which a single-channel video plays on loop from a computer monitor, projecting the artist’s character from the gameplay “Demon’s Souls.” Örgen, born in 1996, is a gothic postmodernist with a weakness for good graphics.

As a designer, Örgen has a distant appreciation of objects, as the media through which styles and usages are pronounced, exchanged and transformed. As part of the art world and its interdisciplinary inclusivity, his installation for 5533 quietly pulses with the aesthetic and conceptual fascinations of the cultural moment, considering such concurrent shows like “Elektroizolasyon” at Arter. But Örgen does not seem to be trying to fit in, quite the opposite, his individuality is as genuine and eccentric as his reasons for doing what he does.

Internal dynamics

There’s a whole and complete contiguity of ideas that run through Örgen's installation, “You Can’t Hide in the Sky,” which speaks to the contrasts between movement and stillness. The use of camouflage paint, in particular, is associated with that middle ground of rest potent with a sense of anticipated compulsion. It is a fixture, and settlement, in all of its modes and expressions which defines domestic life. Yet, spun within the frame of a mind that is unable to stop floating and spinning, in search of action, Örgen’s is the voice of youth, self-objectified.

One aspect of “Case, Keyboard, Winter” is a central processing unit (CPU) mainframe with mountain climbing handles affixed to the end of its legs. Every unit of the piece is handmade. The bench and table on which the monitor rests are jigsaw cut spruce, and topped with a sponge cushion, the work has an unfinished look. Room 5533 is essentially a white cube. In the center of his installation, Örgen manufactured a table out of aerated concrete. It is sculpted with a depression into the core of its surface, which makes for a medievalist, ceremonial air.

Functionality is turned on its head throughout, “You Can’t Hide in the Sky,” such as where Örgen sliced an Adidas tracksuit and represented its vintage color and form in the keys of a piano. The conversion of materials into likenesses other than that normally ascribed to their original contexts is an apt motif in Örgen’s installation from the beginning. Over the door, Örgen cut out a car cover, and fitted it with transport wheels. The paper-thin resemblance of the piece, “Folded Skin” requires a stretch of the mechanical imagination.

Across the selling floor of the compact shop room, Örgen applied silicone to the construction of a cable management spine so as to convey the shape of a backbone connecting the wall to the tiles. The work, titled, “Sweaty Bone,” has unassuming visibility, yet holds to the vision of its idea with certain confidence. And wrapping the ceiling lamps in medical gauze, softening their illumination, "You Can't Hide in the Sky” encompasses the commercial interior with the double-sided, mutual nature of concealment and exposure.

Örgen littered texts around his installation, which winds down a hallway under a course of polypropylene plastic sheets for the piece, “Water and Bad,” set within an aluminum profile and pockmarked with screw nuts. At the very farthest corner from the entrance to 5533, there is a stack of pages. On it, Örgen has divulged some of the psychological genesis of his artwork as an artificial, environmental metaphor for his dark relationship to the source of natural light, as reflected in how conscious he had become of the narrowness of sight, as limited by the eye.