HALUK AKAKÇE

Still Life

February 7- April 6, 2002

Haluk Akakçe was born in Ankara, Turkey, in 1970. He studied Fine Arts at the Bilkent University in Ankara, and continued his studies at the Royal College of Arts, London and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He lives and works in New York. Recently, among others he also participated in the following exhibitions: Animations PS1, Moma, Long Island City, NY and Casino 2001, Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent.

Akakçe is a child of the digital revolution who works in a broad range of media, effortlessly moving from low-tech drawing and wall painting to, more recently, digitally animated video. Akakçe’s figures are cyber-visions of techno-organic hybrids. They remind the fluid morphology of the body in Japanese comics, the contorted visions of Hieronymus Bosch and the arabesques of classical Islamic architecture.

His move from wall painting to video was natural for him, since he conceives the wall as a site of projection. In the exhibition titled Still Life in the gallery Bernier/Eliades, in parallel to the digital prints, the homonymous video, a dual -channel projection piece, will be shown. Two different viewpoints record the same visual space. Akakçe himself describes the viewer’s experience similar with the effort of seeing and thinking with two sides of the brain simultaneously: “Right and left, feminine and masculine, nature and the capital” are few of the oppositions to which Still Life alludes.