Art Residency #0.1: Good Morning in Torba is 2:53 am in Portugal

This exhibition is the result of a one-month partnership between one curator and five pre-selected artists. The terms of collaboration and negotiation were the premises of this curatorial art project, where the curator, the institution and the artists work side by side to create several ways of understanding and perceiving the place where they lived during that period.  In this exhibition it will be possible to see the product of the overlapping of several distinct ways of facing reality, since six ways of seeing, feeling and perceiving the surrounding environment of Torba, Bodrum Peninsula, or even Turkey, are presented.

Some artists decided to create site-specifics works about the exact place where they lived, whether about the space itself or the everyday people who live in it and interact with them. Henriques’ project  “What Fits Into Our Hands” constructed a platform of relationship between the workers and himself, while Yıldız used the propaganda GreenLife‘s billboard to question the propaganda ‘Life is beautiful’. Lastly, Kanzik created a bridge between the past and the present by looking at the country’s ancient history and mapping it on nowadays Bodrum.

Other artists’ works, like the ones from Kus and Ustaoglu, are based in the mental perception of reality. Ustaoglu creates visual games using regular forms that do not exist in nature, namely the square, and produce dialogues between the natural and the unnatural or even double behaviors that our societies force us to possess. Finally, Kus exploits the graffiti universe as a pretext to create his works, using the walls of the big Turkish cities as inspiration. Despite this apparent closeness to a claiming and public universe, his work is the upmost private, as it results from a psychological and imaginative process, in which the artist mentally creates fragments of walls he had never seen before, later transferring them to his canvas.

Curator Inês Valle

Inês Valle (b. 1981) is a young Portuguese curator, who was invited to participate in the first art residency program of Casa dell Arte in Bodrum. Valle is currently working on her thesis for the Master in Curatorial Studies (Fine Art University of Lisbon/ Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation). Her thesis focuses on the strength of artistic practice in conflict territories (political, religious, and cultural) and intends to provoke engagement, and consequently change the way we believe and face the surrounding reality. She has been collaborating with several Portuguese Art Institutions, namely Centro Cultural de Belém (CCB) and Carpe Diem Arte Pesquisa; and writing articles for the only contemporary art magazine in Portugal, Arte Capital.