Amos Eno Gallery is pleased to present Twine, a solo exhibition by Tulu Bayar. An opening reception will take place at the gallery's Bushwick location at 56 Bogart St., on Friday, November 3, from 6 to 8 p.m. Concurrently, an exhibition by Dalit Gurevich will be on view in The Project Space. 

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A  limited number of exhibition catalogs signed by the artist will be available during the exhibition with a curatorial essay by Nina Chkareuli-Mdivani. This exhibition catalog is made possible by a grant from the Mellon Confounding Problems in the Public Humanities and Arts. (In advance, you. may read the essay here; see below.)

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“In her new body of work for the exhibition Twine at Amos Eno Gallery, Turkish-American artist Tulu Bayar visually culls together an identity made up of two, eastern and western, paradigms embodying distinct halves of her life,” writes independent curator, writer, and researcher Nina Chkareuli-Mdivani in her curatorial essay, East and West Entwined: Tulu Bayar at Amos Eno Gallery. “As an immigrant, Bayar carries the sense of being the Other with her, not being fully at home either in the U.S. or in Turkey because she simultaneously exists within two historical and geographic continuums. … In Twine we encounter a more nuanced and abstract meditation on the nature of immigrant experience.”

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The center of Bayar’s exhibition is a series of 18 Citra transfer prints on cotton paper, which she brushed with pastes made from soil, sand, water, and vegetation collected from various geographical regions of the U.S.A. and Turkey. The images are already exquisite in composition — often with a solitary female figure in the foreground, surveying a distant landscape — but are rendered even more haunting as a result of both the transfer process and the earth-paste application. Colors are pushed and pulled, edges are softened, and textures are enhanced. The resulting prints look as if they were discovered in a long-forgotten trunk, transporting us to a time and place we aren’t sure ever existed.

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Bayar’s photo transfer technique symbolizes the imprint of memory on the self. “The images themselves become a collage of moments that have shaped my path,” she says. “I maintain a multidisciplinary practice that weaves through to produce reflections of immigrant experience.”

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Like many immigrants in the States and elsewhere, Bayar negotiates her identity on the borderline of two languages and cultures. Her heightened sensitivity to flux and transition opens a gate for a dialectic worldview where she constantly relearns to exist. “Bayar creates urban cityscapes devoid of crowds, but with hints and outlines of a mysterious feminine figure. By providing us with a reference point of a human body, Bayar not only gives us a scale of her fantastic synthesized structures, but also a protagonist, a human being who is unlikely to inhabit these architectural marvels, yet, is presiding over them,” writes Chkareuli-Mdivani. “The figure is like a hopeful immigrant herself trying to subvert the power of the golden city in the sky, yet trying to hold onto the reality available to her.”

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Bayar’s site-specific installations at Amos Eno Gallery reference and enhance the imagery in her series of prints. A collection of white trays are scattered flat across the wall, with assortments of Turkish coffee and tea cups with saucers as well as mugs with varying heights jutting out from their surfaces. These drinking vessels mimic the architectural forms on the Citra transfers, but their perpendicular orientation makes the resulting “floating cities” rather uncomfortable dwellings for anyone approaching from a different perspective — an apt commentary on the immigrant experience. 

 

Meanwhile, a trio of giant scrolls cascades vertically down another wall. Hung at staggered heights and curling onto the floor in various sculptural piles, they reveal information only on the part that is not rolled. Both ends are rolled up, referencing the hidden past and future, waiting for an unfold. “I assemble disparate elements, ranging from salvaged images, photographs, photographic films, old drawings, and maps to repurposed textiles and cultural belongings, and imbue them with new life,” Bayar says. “This process of amalgamation serves as a metaphor for the mosaic of human existence — fragments coming together to form a coherent whole.”​

 

The circular shapes of the scrolls and their circular motifs reference the white trays and the citra transfer prints, all borrowing from Italo Calvino’s “continuous cities”. Calvino suggests that there is actually one continuous city that does not begin or end. To that end, exposing the less-obvious differences in the things hiding in plain sight in each cityscape or landscape in that continuity becomes a performative act in Bayar’s Twine Exhibition: Material becomes the mirror and she gives materials human traits. The comprehensive effect of Bayar’s prints, trays, and scrolls altogether then transform the gallery into a continuous city.  

 

About Tulu Bayar 

Bayar has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions at museums and galleries in the US as well as in Germany, Denmark, UK, Ireland, France, Colombia, Turkey and China.  Her work is part of public collections including Belfast Exposed Photography, Samuel Dorsky Museum, Elgiz Museum of Contemporary Art (Istanbul), and the Textile Museum at George Washington University. Her exhibitions have been covered by international media including NPR, The Irish Times, Afterimage, Photography Quarterly, TRT (National Public Broadcaster of Turkey) and the Bushwick Daily.

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 A Fulbright Scholar, she has also received funding from Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, Ténot Foundation, artist-in residency grants from Camac Centre d'Art in France and the Center for Photography at Woodstock funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation as well as William Sackett Fellowship through Virginia Center for Creative Arts.

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Bayar received her BA degree in Communications and Journalism from Ankara University and her MFA in Electronic Arts from University of Cincinnati. She is currently Professor of Art and Chair at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, where she co-founded the Ekard Artist Residency.

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For more information, please contact Gallery Director Ellen Sturm Niz at amosenogallery@gmail.com.

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East and West Entwined: Tulu Bayar at Amos Eno Gallery
Essay by Nina Chkareuli-Mdivani

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In her new body of work for the exhibition Twine at Amos Eno Gallery Turkish-American artist Tulu Bayar visually culls together an identity made up of two, eastern and western, paradigms embodying distinct halves of her life. As an immigrant Bayar carries the sense of being the Other with her, not being fully at home either in the U.S. or in Turkey because she simultaneously exists within two historical and geographic continuums. Cultural theorist Homi K. Bhabha looks at the Otherness as integral part of post-colonial intellectual project; to him Otherness as a rigid attribute, something that is fixed in time, memory, and representation – it
is something that stays. To examine this ambivalence between belonging and alienation Bayar merges two emblematic cities of the new and old worlds, creating a utopian city of her own and asking if they indeed could coalesce into one. Eschewing compartmentalized thinking of genre and media Bayar moves freely in-between photography, moving-image, drawing, sculpture and installation.

 

Bayar creates urban cityscapes devoid of crowds, but with hints and outlines of a mysterious feminine figure. This abstract being is a remnant of her earlier steps as an artist when she used to work with physical people, directly interacting with them on and outside of the streets, getting in their homes, learning about their daily strivings. Over time nature of this interaction has changed and it became more internalized. By providing us with a reference point of a human body Bayar not only gives us a scale of her fantastic synthesized structures, but also a protagonist, a human being who is unlikely to inhabit these architectural marvels, yet, is presiding over them. The figure is like a hopeful immigrant herself trying to subvert the power of the golden city in the sky, yet trying to hold onto the reality available to her. Subversion of power is of interest to Bayar as a female artist coming from a traditionally patriarchal society.

 

She is an advocate for independence, authenticity, and feminist agency although she would not want to frame herself only in relation to the feminist discourse. Patriarchy in Turkey and in the U.S. continues to be problematic through the seductiveness and blandness of its mass appeal, Bayar’s earlier series of work including Chimera are more devoted to this social issue. “Through the act of including a female figure in my creations, I reclaim authorship of my narrative and
assert my own agency,” she says. In Twine we encounter a more nuanced and abstract meditation on the nature of immigrant experience.

Instead of simply showing sterile, translucent and meticulously transplanted images of the city the artist brings into the gallery the actual soil collected from various locales. Some of the photo transfers are coated with water, land, sand, debris. Their coloration differs based on the ratio of soil and water the artist uses to achieve and communicate her effects. Specific areas of Turkey and U.S. have a physical presence in the gallery through the color gradation in her prints. As Bayar says: “The photo transfer technique that I heavily use in Twine symbolizes the
imprint of memory on the self, and the images themselves become a collage of moments that have shaped my path. I maintain a multidisciplinary practice that weaves through to produce reflections of immigrant experience.” This reflection is not different from the concept of forensic architecture first implemented by Eyal Weizman as he pieced together architectural evidence coming from different types of civil conflicts. Yet, if Weizman is an avid advocate for human rights he investigates state strategies to eliminate these rights. Bayar, on the opposite, stands on the guard of the shared humanity and calls upon transformative force of the Sufism to do so. “The philosophy of Rumi, wholeness and oneness resonate with me and inform my artistic practice. I am, of course, talking about a spiritual influence, not a religious one. I am interested in the Sufist maxim regarding interconnected metaphysical nature of beings and forms; and how individual differences reside within communal existence.”

In Sufism person connection to the supreme being is at the front and center of individual quest in understanding oneself, a pursuit fully corresponding to a path of an artist and a teacher. In the time of crisis of any kind, countries and individuals remember mythological figures of strength and so does Bayar in her metaphysical search, looking at the grounding presence of cities that have nourished her over time. To her “[o]therness becomes porous and translucent.” Fragmentation of digital and physical realities is upon us, yet there is a way to realign. Through
her multilayered citra solvent photo transfers and site-specific installations at Amos Eno Bayar provides an uplifting and personal image of a synthesis not strictly limited to reductionist approach to architecture. Grotesque and beauty are situated side by side here as do Invisibility and visibility; repelling and attracting. “I assemble disparate elements, ranging from salvaged images, photographs, photographic films, old drawings and maps to repurposed textiles and cultural belongings, and imbue them with new life. This process of amalgamation serves as a metaphor for the mosaic of human existence - fragments coming together to form a coherent whole.”

 

Berlin-based philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes at length about bits of information we inhale without digesting thus creating an endless cycle of wasteful and empty consumption and the deep alienation as the result of it. In contrast to this tendency Tulu Bayar is in a long-term relationship with her art and invites her audience to remove layers and look at each one of them rather than to blindly accept a linear and clear-cut reality.

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ABOUT NINA CHKAREULI-MDIVANI

Nina Chkareuli-Mdivani is Georgian-born and New York-based independent curator, writer, and researcher. She holds undergraduate degrees in International Relations and Gender Studies from Tbilisi State University and Mount Holyoke College, and a graduate degree in Museum Studies from the City University of New York. Chkareuli-Mdivani's book, King is Female, published in October 2018 in Berlin by Wienand Verlag explores the lives of three Georgian women artists and is the first publication to investigate questions of the feminine identity in the context of the Eastern European historical, social, and cultural transformation of the last twenty years. Chkareuli-Mdivani has contributed articles to Hyperallergic, Flash Art International, MoMa.post, The Brooklyn Rail, The Arts Newspaper, JANE Magazine Australia, NERO Editions Italy, Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art, XIBT Magazine Berlin, Eastern European Film Bulletin, Indigo Magazine, Arte & Lusso Dubai and others. She has curated over 10 exhibitions in New York, Germany, Latvia, and Georgia. Her research involves the intersection of art history, museum, and decolonization studies with a focus on totalitarian art and trauma theory. As a researcher Chkareuli-Mdivani aims to synthesize historical and contemporary.

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About Amos Eno Gallery

Amos Eno Gallery has been a fixture in the New York art scene since 1974 when it opened in Soho. It has moved with changing arts neighborhoods over the years to land at its current space at 56 Bogart St. in Brooklyn, across from the Morgan Ave. L train stop. The gallery is open Thursdays through Sundays from noon to 6 p.m. and is run by a small community of professional artists, both from New York City and across the country, and a part-time director.

 

For more information, please contact Gallery Director Ellen Sturm Niz at amosenogallery@gmail.com.

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To view a PDF of the press release and checklist, click here.