Eternal Light

“Eternal Light”, the first exhibition of the non-profit digital platform Bilsart Shop, considers light as a fundamental component of art perception. Focusing on many perspectives in art, from the physical function of light that enables vision to the concepts it symbolizes, “Eternal Light” brings together the works of four artists working in different media, opening them up for discussion.

Nermin Er’s videos “Snowy Night”, “Windy Night” and “Underwater Coral” from the series “Meanwhile Elsewhere” are created by animating the installations produced by the artist in 2015 using three-dimensional effects. There is a central light at the core of these scenes that seem to be trapped in a time capsule. These spaces, where time flows in an infinite loop, present the artist’s unique microcosms suspended in the midst of darkness.

Leman Sevda Darıcıoğlu’s video “Angelus Altera” draws its inspiration from archival materials related to Turkey’s performance art scene in the 1990s and establishes the relationality between the concepts of heritage and future through analogies between Turkey’s socio-politics, queer history and the history of performance art. From a queer perspective, the performance explores hegemonic history from the past to the present and opens itself to the future by focusing on the concepts of visibility and invisibility, oppression and relief, bodily closure and opening.

Ferhat Özgür’s “Football is Life” references Albrecht Dürer’s painting “Adam and Eve”, but the woman in Özgür’s work offers a ball to the man instead of an apple. Audaciously constructing its discourse through Christian iconography that can be subversive even if it offends the public gaze, the work links male dominance in the football and sports industry in Turkey to politics, illicit trade and chauvinistic manifestations.

Meltem Şahin’s series “sketches with+for+from ai”, selected for the National Gallery’s AI collection, consists of 3 works in which the artist tries to understand her own style, the symbiotic relationship of her work with machine learning, the new world order and her position within it. The series examines the body through art, craft and artificial intelligence, redefining it in this way, revealing new sketches of this definition in each piece, opening up the concepts of past, future, present and reality to discussion once again with the viewer’s perception.