Infatuation

Versus Art Project, İstanbul, Turkey

Exhibition, 2023

“Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.”
―Sonnet 116, William Shakespeare

Intricately woven words follow one another to support that true Love is unaltered by time and immune to changing circumstances in one of the most popular sonnets of William Shakespeare. The unchanging and constant perception of “Love” is presented as a value to cherish. The possibility of unmoving physical attachment suggested by these verses, woven like a labyrinth, constantly repeats that stability between two beings is possible. For sincerity to be achieved, this stability that is not “Time’s fool”, that cannot be manipulated by fleeting obsessions, is essential.

Ömer Pekin, in his second solo exhibition to be held at Versus Art Project titled “INFATUATION”, focuses on the faith for an unmoving Truth. With the physical objects he presents and the perceptual manipulations he constructs around them, he invites us to rethink the idea that seeks rigidity of experience. The charm of the new and the emotions novelty fuels are brought to the audience through the questions the artist constructs around the tactile and the impulsive, the fleeting and the permanent.

Recognizing the experience of artistic creation and the dialogue between the viewer and the object as a process of continual becoming, Pekin focuses on flux, change, and where the realities that cannot be experienced in this constant change can find a place in the world of short-lived obsessions we live in.

The thought of contemporary philosopher Graham Harman, one of the founders and foremost advocates of the philosophical movement known as Object-Oriented Ontology, has been an ongoing inspiration for the artist’s practice. The recent series of works that are brought together in INFATUATION keeps drawing from the encounters that constitute the focus of Harman’s thought, and the dynamics of artistic experience between object and spectator. Through light, and lack thereof, the exhibition seeks to ask questions on the relation that comes to being between the spectator and the object of art. The nature of various forms of interaction is discussed through the idea of the “hidden essence”, an essence that is not reducible to any particular property of the artwork such as material, visual qualities or tactility, but is rather based on its substance arising from the way in which the artwork interacts with the viewer’s imagination and emotions.

Through the possibilities of artistic experience that he opens up to discussion, the artist calls on the audience to consider all possible ways of encountering the object of art, how fragile the bond we create with the Other is, and how it can be a form of social power relations, rather than a mere private emotion. As he invites us to rethink what the essence of the attraction towards the object of art is, he studies the nature of fascination, enchantment, attachment and all similar affects on multiple levels.

―Burcu Fikretoğlu

Related project: Infatuation Backroom