Memory of the Unrememberable
Solo Exhibition
A name that silence and the walls give back to me
A strange house contained in my voice 1
For the one who knows how to listen, a house in the past is a geometry of echoes. When one could reconstruct the resonances of all the rooms of the house filled with sounds, the memories that have been imprinted in each room of that house come back alive with the scents that have remained in the empty rooms. We should make note of how we fill the space in which we live in accordance with all the dialectics of life, and how we take root day by day in “a corner of the world”. The house is our corner in the world. It is a true cosmos. Just like fire or water, the house, too, is the light source of fantasying that illuminates the synthesis of the unrememberable and the memory.
Damla Yalçın presents a synthesis of her memories and dreams through a phenomenological approach focused on the inner value of the interior. She sheds light on her personal memory through embroidery, which is also based on her own story.
Focusing on dreams about home through an approach that is heedful of the agreement of memory and dream so as not to disturb it, the artist touches the poetic foundations of spaces with her poetic images rather than memories. She places objects that are the embodiments of accumulated emotions in her spaces.Inserting herself into the images she creates, in which the starting points are her old photographs, the artist transforms the rooms, where her eternalized moment of waiting occurs, into places of spectacle where memory and fantasying merge.
The most precious virtue of the house is that it accommodates fantasying; it allows accumulating and preserving the past, the future, and the present. As the places we have inhabited in the past are not destroyed and perished within ourselves, we could relive the memories of our old rooms in the form of fantasies. All the spaces of our past solitude, the places where we have suffered loneliness, and the places where we have enjoyed being on our own, remain intact in ourselves. Every corner in a room where two walls meet, the nooks that we choose to enfold ourselves, are forms reminiscent of loneliness in our imagination. The home where the artist was alone, the room, the window front and the corners of the room, offer her the framework to
fantasize, and she can only finalize and complete this fantasy by virtue of the artworks that she presents through poetic images. These images by the artist, invite the viewers, residing in their own corners, to explore each and every detail to be able to breath life into this fantasy.
The space inhabited is far from all references to simple geometrical forms. The embroidery hoops, into which Damla Yalçın has installed light sources, provide a translucent substance to the rooms she has created. Their walls almost become condensed or dissipated according to the wishes of the artist. Just like a house that inhales and exhales, or an armoured garment, it could stretch out and extend infinitely.
This is a house that transcends geometry. It is always the same dream that exists along the axis of fantasying, sometimes concerned with the heavens and earth, and at others focused on family and the cosmos: the Sun-Lamp. This dream, that is as old as our world itself, possesses a magical flexibility in the illuminated embroidery hoops of Damla Yalçın.
Through the power of her narrative, constructed by taking the abruptness of her dreams into account, the artist provides the means for the viewers to discover themselves in the roundness of their being. We realize that we live in the roundness of life. Damla Yalçın’s round embroidery hoops offer ideas that are so powerfully interconnected that they could allow us to place ourselves in the starting position over and over again.
These embroideries that are used as expressions of privacy, bear the dialectics of the open and the closed, and of the interior space and the exterior space. They form an obvious threshold between the open and the closed, and between inside and outside. The interiors, in which she had reconciled with loneliness, are accompanied by embroideries of exterior space that make us feel the soughing of the wind. These exteriors render visible the merits of the house in terms of protection and resistance against the severity of the wind.
For the artist, this impassioned journey between spaces is an exploration in the tunnels of existence, through the corridors of the mind. This lyrical journey has its predecessor in the advent of the poetic image and finds its ideal metaphor in the private realms of her home. She steers the viewer into a flux where art, poetry and consciousness germinate within.
1 Pierre SEGHERS, Le Domaine Public, p. 70 (English translation from, Gaston BACHELARD, The Poetics of Space, p. 60)
Text: Sibel Erdamar
