OCULUS II: The World Inside, the Istanbul Outside
İpek Yeğinsü
Catalog Link
Living in a city like Istanbul is highly rewarding, but it also comes with a price. Our perceptual universe is continuously enriched with all sorts of colors, sounds and textures while struggling with the chaos of overstimulation. As a meeting and cooperation lab for plural identities, the city also has an atmosphere in which individuals can easily get lost in their own solitude. In fact, with all the inspiring and challenging aspects of its “personality”, Istanbul partly resembles each of its dwellers, and each of us is slightly reminiscent of the city we live in.
Taking Istanbul as its departure point, “OCULUS II” brings together works created in various techniques and illustrating the universal nature of the human experience. It presents the young generation’s sensitivities and quests in a
narrative style dissolving the boundaries between the individual and the society, the past and the future, the inside and the outside while swiftly oscillating between these two scales. The exhibition venue’s multiple layers of meaning and its relationship with its surroundings also integrate the city itself into the narrative, thanks to which the viewer’s encounters with his/her own inner world through the works in the exhibition give rise to new psychogeographic possibilities.
In the exhibition consisting of three sub-themes, “The World Inside” focuses on the individual’s inner experiences while “The Istanbul Outside” pursues the social realities revealed through urban aesthetic. “Online-Offline, on the other hand, offers a critical glance at the cultural effects of digital technologies.
