Fusun Onur: Aynadan Iceri : Through the Looking Glass

ARTER is hosting a comprehensive solo exhibition by Fusun Onur, one of Turkey s pioneering contemporary artists. Curated by ARTERs Exhibitions Director Emre Baykal, the exhibition borrows its title from Lewis Carrolls book Through the Looking Glass Through the Looking Glass brings together more than 40 works spanning from the artist s early career to her most recent production. The works in the exhibition cover an era of almost 50 years committed to an uninterrupted research on the potentials of space, time, rhythm and form that are inherent in simple, everyday materials. The exhibition thus aims to offer a survey of sun Onur s body of work, from early abstract geometric drawings to the idea of sculpture as a linear drawing in space| from three-dimensional spatial objects to installations that employ ordinary materials such as furniture, textiles, beads, toys and so on. Following a route that echoes the intuitive co-existence of individual pieces in Fun Onurs world, the exhibition focuses on the strategies the artist has developed in order to expand the boundaries of painting and sculpture as well as to break the borders between them. The exhibition also offers clues as to how the artists work has embraced, in the course of her production, quotidian, narrative and even autobiographical elements with the introduction of a gradually diversifying range of materials. Through the Looking Glass also features a number of previously unrealised works produced especially for the exhibition and premiered at ARTER. One of these is a work Fusun Onur originally modelled in styrofoam for a competition in 1972. This model was revisited and transformed into a labyrinth/space that surrounds the viewers and multiplies their image on its walls of mirror. Another is a project conceived and drafted by Onur in 1993, yet remained unrealised until this day. In this eight-hour long video, a pink boat and three rectangular shapes following its tail are released i