New Viewings #37, curated by David Thorp

Galerie Barbara Thumm Viewing Room

Online

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New Viewings creates an opportunity to explore what possibilities an online exhibition and installation can engender that the physical exhibition cannot. What freedoms can an artist be offered and in turn explore that they are unable to do in the IRL exhibition space? The fluidity of an unending stream of digital possibilities that can be manipulated by the artist allow them to not only consider the actual artworks but how they may be contextualised in an idealised space. There is an inherent contradiction within this process encapsulated in the relationship between these two entities. On the one hand in the imaginative interpretation of artworks in an idealised virtual space and, on the other, in the market potential of extant IRL artworks. Criticism has been levelled repeatedly about the deleterious effect that the market can have on creative output and opportunity and this has been augmented by the conversation about inclusivity in contemporary art. This posits that recent global events clearly show that we need to adapt and evolve, adjustments must be made in the creative industries as in the world in general. An approach with a focus on unity, inclusivity and diversity is necessary to ensure artists’ exposure and counter the condition of success governed by a few. Online spaces play a vital role in this process. As part of a continuum of production and display, they help to ensure that creativity can be realised by artists of all backgrounds and actively address the role contemporary art has to play in a world subject to a new normal. The selection of these four of artists has been made with this in mind.

David Thorp

Mustafa Hulusi

Bitter Sweet, 2021. Installation view. Dimensions variable

Bitter Sweet
Bitter Sweet, the title of Mustafa Hulusi’s exhibition takes as its inspiration his latest suite of paintings of bitter oranges, which originate from photographic images taken by the artist of orange trees within the various groves surrounding his family’s ancestral home in Cyprus. Orange and lemon trees abound in Cyprus, commonly grown in many gardens both within rural villages or suburban towns. Notably, there are large plantations situated in the north that were originally established during the British colonial period from the early 20th century in territory now disputed by both Cypriot factions since the island’s forcible division in 1974. They have a similar significance to those contested Jaffa oranges grown in Palestine and the orange tree species in Cyprus partially originates from the Palestinian variation. They become symbols of imposed ethnic division.

Grapes, another archetypal Mediterranean symbol, are the focus of Hulusi’s video work „Out of the Loop“. This film shot in Cyprus and Bolivia begins with the image of the Uyuni Salt Lake. The level of water reflects mirror-like across the surface whilst gently dissolving into images of swaying vines and grapes to slowly emerge against the vivid blue sky. A bird song can be heard in the background falling away as the sound of wind and water prevail.

The essence of Bitter Sweet can be summed up in Hulusi’s own words. ‘The ecstatic subject as a means of transcending identarian politics’. Hulusi’s identity has been described as ‘hybrid’, born as he was to Cypriot Turkish parents who had emigrated to London in the early 1960’s. The debate surrounding hybridity, when politicised, may include the subversion and challenge of division and separation depriving a dominant culture of its authority and its potential to overlook an intrinsic imbalance in power relations between the colonised and the coloniser that can conceal cultural differences. This imbalance is something that Hulusi’s practice has been consistently engaged with since his early use of abandoned billboards in London’s East End to display a series of posters bluntly bearing his name and, on other sites, a starburst logo he calls an ‘Expander’. These earlier projects set the tone within his practice of questioning his identity in the context of a dominant sanitised mass media driven culture.

Hulusi’s project has been to consistently examine the way which different visual languages shape our perception. In addition to the hybridity of identity, he employs the earlier horticultural use of the idea; hybridity that involves the cross-pollination of plants. A process that once undertaken results in a natural organic third new species. In his view nature is always perceived through the prism of politics; the idea of nature is bound to geography, in this instance specifically to this eastern Mediterranean island.

While combining different historical references with a diversity of styles and media, Hulusi scrutinises the traditional art historical conflation of abstraction and representation combining different references along with other, emotional, associations; pleasure and destruction; negativity and ecstasy. Mustafa Hulusi’s subject matter ranges across environmentalism and the natural world; population (in)activity in relation to the loss of cultures and the erasure of history. A cross pollination of ethics and aesthetics from which emerges a hybrid of the prosaic and the sublime in the context of the contradiction inherent in the display of simulation as real.

Mustafa Hulusi (b. 1971, London, UK), lives and works in London. He has exhibited widely in Europe and in United States, and more recently in Asia. Mustafa Hulusi represented the Republic of Cyprus at the 52nd International Art Exhibition of Venice Biennale in 2007. Mustafa Hulusi’s work has been included in exhibitions at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK; the Saatchi Gallery, London, UK; Sean Kelly Gallery, New York, USA; Baibakov Art Projects, Moscow, Russia; the Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam, Netherlands; BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK; MoMA PS1, New York, USA and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany.

The artist received his BA in Fine Art and Critical Studies from Goldsmiths College, London and his MA in Photography from the Royal College of Art, London. He also holds an MA in Critical Theory from Central St. Martin’s School of Art, London.
Selected private and public collections include; Tate Modern, London, UK; British Council Collection, London, UK; La Caixa Foundation, Barcelona, Spain; the Pinault Collection, Paris, France; the Zabludowicz Collection, London, UK and the UBS Bank Art Collection, London, UK and Zurich, Switzerland.

Mustafa Hulusi
Out of the Loop, 2020
Single channel video loop
01:00’ minutes
Edition of 3 + 1AP

New Viewings #37, curated by David Thorp

Galerie Barbara Thumm Viewing Room

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