(LEAVING) THE HOUSE WHERE WE GREW UP, 2022
Innergy / Watery Incantations at ‘(Leaving) the house where we grew up’ group show organised by Monitor Izmir at Mainetti Mansion between 19 November and 17 December 2022 in Izmir/TR.
What would it reveal if we went back to the room where we spent our childhood and fell asleep? The exhibition titled (Leaving) The House Where We Grew Up aims to create a meeting space for what we know about ourselves and the world we were born into, and what we have not yet encountered, through the states of sleeping, dreaming and reaching the unconscious. The exhibition, which brings together the works of Gözde Mimiko Türkkan, Deniz Gül, Monica Papi, Volkan Aslan and Tolga Balcı, whispers the sentence “go deep, sink” to the listeners’ ears 1 with the aim of reaching beyond.
In her work titled Innergy / Watery Incantations, Gözde Mimiko Türkkan traces the fairy tales told just before falling asleep. The extraordinary character of this tale is the water. The story of the water pushes the viewer to question the depths of consciousness. In Türkkan’s narrative, water is the carrier of ancient knowledge. The civilizations that sank and disappeared, those that continue their journey from existence to the present day, and everything that is not yet visible with their concrete existence are inside the water. In one of Jung’s dream analyses, there is a character who perceives the sea as the unconscious and the waves that hit the shore as a flow from the unconscious to consciousness. This person says that those who try to swim in the waves will be dragged, while those who dive into the water can easily move forward. In one of his dreams, the same person fears that the waves will take the ground under his feet, while in another dream he leaves himself among the waves. Our self, which is a very small part of the ocean, is changeable and in a constant state of flux, just like the ocean. But, just like water knows itself, can we simply know ourselves when we surrender to the flow?
Text extracts: Nursaç Sargon for Monitor Izmir