INTERVIEW: ÖZGE ENGİNÖZ

all images: Courtesy and © Özge Enginöz

Born in Balıkesir in Turkey, Özge Enginöz is a young contemporary artist who is specifically known for her mixed-media works. Her delicate choice of materials comprises and integrates toys, works on paper, old photos, video, collage, painting and drawing. Having studied at the Art and Design Faculty of Yıldız Teknik University, the Istanbul-based artist spent two years in the Istanbul Art Center recidency program and subsequently exhibited her work in several solo and group shows across Europe. Currently on display at Artnivo's first pop-up exhibition "Download" at Sofa Hotel and at the group show "Where am I?" at Kare Art Gallery, Özge Enginöz’s work is specifically present in Istanbul’s art scene. During our interview in Çukurcuma, she talked about her artistic practice, about her inspiration and about how Turkey’s current political situation influences contemporary art.

CRAFT & BLING BLING – FAKE

all images: Exhibition "CRAFT & BLING BLING – FAKE" at Depot Basel // detail photos by © Thomas Albrecht, installation views by © Gregor Brändli

The design exhibition CRAFT & BLING BLING – FAKE at DEPOT BASEL in Switzerland discusses a model of doubt and truth along the interpretation of fakeness. Twelve international jewellery designers created specific art and design objects that are concerned with oscillating emphasis on materiality and appearances, authorship and duplication, adaption and replica, superficiality and preciousness. Presented inside a cube of blue velvet, their works describe reversed encounters with fakeness, in which the designers play with the semiotics of fake and transform its implied crisis of originality – the effect of doubt – into an art form itself. 

HOTELS

photo by and  © artfridge.de

For a long time artists have been fascinated by the transitional state that hotels offer: people come and go, welcomes and goodbyes take place at the same time, a sense of melancholia and loneliness, of anonymity and alienation accompany each space. The lobby remains a non-space – individual rooms remain temporary homes. Only the traces of usage reveal that former guests have been sleeping in the same bed, using the same shower, opening the same window. And exactly because these rooms are premised on neutrality and on dry interiors, because they do not seem to belong to anyone in particular, and because they can be rented on a daily basis, they regularly act as exhibition spaces.

INTERVIEW: LUC FULLER

all images: Luc Fuller "Standing Paintings" / each work Untitled, 2014 / © Luc Fuller / Courtesy the artist and ROD BARTON, London

40 "Standing Paintings" currently occupy the floor space of Rod Barton's gallery in London, each displaying the outlines of Wu-Tang Clan's symbol "W" on their front side. They were created by 1989-born American artist Luc Fuller, who employs his art to explore cultural appropriation, the merging of sub- and high-culture and eventually in the meaning-production of signs, arrangements and exhibition formats. While painting is a medium commonly defined by its spatial distance to its spectators and its status as an object on a wall that is to be observed, Luc inverts this scheme and incorporates his paintings in an environment, rendering them into a "democratic" pattern. Visitors thus walk through the paths formed by his works, they enter a scene of art – a painting-scape. Also in other exhibitions that Portland-based Luc did, he repeatedly questions the classic terms of installation, materiality and space – everything is, as he once said, in "flux". In our interview with the artist, Luc told us about why and how Wu-Tang Clan's symbol is a part of his work, his fascination with subcultures and about his playful and similarly  ambitious approach of reconsidering exhibition formats.