SEMA BOYANCI

12 local teahouse, meatball and bean restaurants with their interior decorations in their corners. Boyancı has a 17 year-old assistant at her studio in Ankara. She comes to the studio from one of the shantytowns on the distant hills surrounding the city each day, and returns each night to that far and mysterious but impoverished home. Her mother is an Anatolian woman who cleans her house and is illiterate. The girl and her mother do not partake in real city life, aside from the compulsory contact they make with some parts of it occasionally. Their cultural perception is still wrought with the images of where they came from. They haven’t even gone to a cinema, an art exhibit, a theater play or any such engagement in the city. Despite living in Ankara, they haven’t yet seen Ulus, Kızılay or Çankaya… The family migrated to Ankara from a village in Kars, and soon, a spouse to one and a father to the other, the “chief” of the patriarchal family whom he had overloaded on, left them, his home, many of his priorities and his extreme values flat on their faces to be with another woman. Boyancı’s assistant is a talkative young girl. She tells her about how in the winter they burn remnant fabrics to warm up, from sofa coverings, chair throws, curtains and so on, leftover sewing material from the makeshift upholstery shop immediately adjacent to their home. The artist then experiences a deep evolution, recalling the feeling once again of the difficult living conditions in dwellings upon the hills afar, to which she was a witness but has in recent years been distant. She, too, gets preoccupied with the mystical fabric remnants and asks the girl to bring whatever she can find to her. Boyancı in one sense wants to touch those remnant pieces of fabric, to develop relationships with them, and reach out to their souls and minds. As if by doing so they will be paired and socialized; as if when she does this, she will be comforted, having completed her own existence. It’s almost as if Boyancı’s works in this new exhibit are a fictional version of her sense of existence having found an identity? In the language of art, this new “assemblage” of sorts, which should be considered works of semi “assemblage” are entirely based on this perspective of the image of looking in from a selective exterior window: Deeply deceiving the eye and enticing it with curved fabric painted as if real, transforming the canvas into an lower space, while the subsequently appended cast glass and painted images endeavoring to “appear as if real” worked upon as a second layer imply an intellectual, philosophical construct. These new semi “assemblage” works of the exhibition, when considered from different contexts, are indeed inevitably associated with the previous works of this artist from many perspectives, as is the case for most artists: Anadolu Medeniyetleri [Anatolian Civilizations], Hayat Ağacı [Tree of Life], Hasret Resimleri [Paintings of Longing], Kapadokya Resimleri [Cappadocia Paintings], Eylül Resimleri [September Paintings], Eldoran’a Kuşlar Konunca [When Birds Land at Eldoran], Cunda Resimleri [Cunda Paintings], Kaf Dağının Ardında Datça [Datça Beyond the Mythical Kaf Mountain], etc. series are her imagery references