The Irregular Heritage of Memory

The first exhibition to display works from the joint project by artists Aylin Önel and Güneş Savaş, “The Irregular Heritage of Memory” reflects on the organic processes that have brought together and bridged the individual practices of the two artists. Having simultaneously experienced critical rites of passages such as motherhood in their lives, the artists have developed a body of work that proposes a heterogeneous and collaborative model for artistic production. The works in Önel and Savaş’s practice tend to explore the creative and destructive processes that shape our world - and the transformative stages in between. Stories belonging to everyday objects endure both in memory and physical form, and the artists investigate the archeologies of materials and forms from seemingly ordinary and intimate moments.

Taking inspiration from their joint readings of Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea series, Önel’s sculptural works and Savaş’s works on paper together form a quotidian cosmology via the reuseage of (in)finite matter. As a calm resistance to humankind’s destructive ways, waste materials and plant life are interwoven like an epic story of floating islands, invented/imagined species and specimens, anthropological excavations, human and non-human interactions, and things brought to the shore of our consciousness by drifting waves.

Formed like archipelago or a chain of islands, the works connect to form a new geography in which individual parts, ideas, memories and persons become intertwined via artistic and sensory exchanges. The works in this exhibition explore and interrogate the myth of human supremacy, and provide alternatives to the hierarchical systems of the Anthropocene age and its by-products. Önel’s adoption of waste materi als and natural residues in her sculptures, and Savaş’s inclusive representations of the botanical world and plant life proposes an emancipated alternative to existing and degenerative earth system processes.

Similar to materials that have turned into waste, memory is also subject to the processes of motion, change and transformation. For this reason, a wasteland can be an endless terrain for the uninhibited imagination. In the pursuit of an alternative archeology, Önel mixes paper pulp with the found materials encountered on her walks and remains of her quotidian routines. Through this deliberate act of collecting materials belonging to everyday life (including egg shells, paper bags, fruit peels, salt etc.) the artist is able to track and map movements on various physical and psychological landscapes. Savaş’s works constitute an intimate diary of the delicacies of existence, through her drawings of plant-like natural morphologies juxtaposed on various papers and notebooks. With a solid dialogue between their two and three-dimensional creations, Önel and Savaş’s works reflect a desire for new, sustainable ways of thinking about the environment and its relationship with the human subject. Their art turns physical residues into valuable fragments of their interconnected lives.