Seasonless / Mevsimsiz

Seasonless features works that belong to three separate series. On Cursed Times is a series of works that span all three floors of the exhibition space. The series includes images and objects that have been found, collected, adopted, or transformed (beginning with the artist’s last solo exhibition An Isolated Gaze in early 2020) and engaged in conversations amongst themselves to create new contexts. These conversations touch upon the topics of art, literature and mythology, and cruise the shores of Mesopotamian, Anatolian, and Aegean myths. The threatening existences of objects point out the harsh and unreliable character of current times, through puns and semantic shifts. When Sartre was writing about Baudelaire, he defined him, first and foremost, as a “cursed” poet. Based on the bleakest poet in the history of literature, Birsel, in this series, examines his own time.

Birsel’s series “Don`t You See Somethings Are Approaching?” has been going on for five years; it’s a group of works that frame static landscapes, positioning the audience in a bunker-like protective inner space. With this series located in the basement of Ark Kültür, Birsel offers the audience a series of ink paintings that accompany our wavy moods from seasons to seasonlessness, from light to dark. On the walls, he opens up horizontal rectangular slits through which we can look from indoors to outside. "Don`t You See Somethings Are Approaching?” pays homage to Virilio’s thoughts on stopping the flow of time in The Aesthetics of Disappearance, or to the works of masters such as Turner, de Chirico and Nolde.

Basic Food Items and Objective Vocabulary, on the top floor of Ark Kültür, involves Birsel’s both most recent and oldest works in the show. The series began by tracing the influence of the economic hardships during the pandemic and isolation period (2020-21) on individuals; it follows a path in which the artist places certain staple foods in front of him and watches them by setting the light, shadow, and perspective. Later on, Birsel draws these substances one by one in their own isolated settings and hence resists the feeling of uncertainty that dominated the pandemic with these weekly drawings. Basic Food Items and Objective Vocabulary also includes drawings from 1999-2000 (arguably in a state of mind that is similar to today’s) in which Birsel thoroughly watches and examines certain objects and sets on to create a vocabulary for them. Although there may be a temporal interval between these two sets of drawings, it becomes clear that certain things do not change over time. For Birsel, drawing, looking, and examining begin with questioning the position and the reason for the existence of what stands in front of him and before us all. Much like walking is a way of thinking, for Birsel, drawing only makes sense as a method of organizing his thoughts.

Seasonless may be regarded as a state of proliferation or as a sentence that opens up to plurality. Its existence stretches and expands across the space and looks for possibilities for new associations. Spanning the three floors of Ark Kültür, the exhibition remembers a jester who winks at the seasons, or at seasonlessness, at life, at death, movement, stability, and play.