Ulgen Semerci

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Do I Contradict Myselves?

05.04.22 - 07.05.22

ArtOn Istanbul

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Ulgen Semerci’s solo exhibition “Do I Contradict Myselves?” is titled after Daisy Hildyard's 2018 talk appropriating the prominent Walt Whitman poem “Song of Myself”. Whitman writes;

 

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

 

The works in the exhibition are rooted in Semerci's dreams from the past two years in which different persons; existing, imagined, missed, feared, from the past or present become active agents, intersect, and become one another. Although we speak of a self, we cannot think of the individual as an isolated entity. Karen Barad proposes the term intra-action for bodies, both human and non-human, in action with one another. Intra-action doesn't understand agency as an inherent individualistic property, but as a dynamism of forces.

 

Semerci aims to look both inward and outward, overlapping the microcosm and the macrocosm, attempting to experience interconnections and intra-connections and perceiving the self relationally.