SELİM SÜME

The exhibition is inspired by the movie ‘Les glaneurs et la glaneuse’ by the French artist Agnès Varda made in 2000. The subject matter of Varda’s film are people that collect garbage or crops that are leftover after harvest and artists that work with found objects. As a filmmaker, she considers herself a collector also. We believe that the act of collecting is an epistemological principle of photography that changes the paradigm of artistic creation. The principle of the artist as a collector utilizing aesthetic of the fragman, readymade, collage, even performance and art practices after 1960 is deeply tied to the image production process of the photographer. The photographers in this exhibition are collecting from the street-city, the skin-body, the keyhole, the memory-history, the nature-garden and the identity-masks piled up over one another. They wander in spaces where hierarchies are eroded, exchange values are wasted, objects have become dysfunctional and images, translucent. They work like collector who liberate physical drives, time, space and object from the despotism of functionality and necessity. First, the world loses its aura and assumes a frightening strangeness.

Immediately after this, a montage that opens up new possibilities of meaning begins. The exhibition 'Les Glaneurs et Les Glaneuses' itself can be considered as a fragment from contemporary Turkish photography, a modest result of collecting done within a generation. The exhibition brings together 18 collectors-photographers investigate in the ontology, possibilities, limits, passages and abysses of photography in vastly different ways. Finally, it invites the viewer to be a collector in order to create her own discourse through the principle of montage, to disassemble conventional categories. The exhibition curated by Selim Süme and Ezgi Bakçay.