| Serkan Özkaya, a conceptual artist based in Istanbul, has been showing since the age of 18. He is a provocateur, a utopianist, a kind of merry prankster in the tradition of Duchamp and the Dadaists, shuttling between the hyperbolic, the deadpan, and the serious, as he explores and expands the meaning of history, creativity and authenticity. Özkaya, who has a Ph.D. in German studies from Istanbul University, prefers the ludic, absurdist, and subversive to the politically aggressive, although his work can be rife with political implications. He keeps his tropes more philosophic than activist, more interrogative than axiomatic. His subject, the object, and the history of art are examined from an oblique, collapsible angle, from a point of view that looks askance at the so-called center of art, one sensitized to reproduction, its uses and abuses. |  |
Lily Wei
Serkan Özkaya, a conceptual artist based in Istanbul, has been showing since the age of 18. He is a provocateur, a utopianist, a kind of merry prankster in the tradition of Duchamp and the Dadaists, shuttling between the hyperbolic, the deadpan, and the serious, as he explores and expands the meaning of history, creativity and authenticity. Özkaya, who has a Ph.D. in German studies from Istanbul University, prefers the ludic, absurdist, and subversive to the politically aggressive, although his work can be rife with political implications. He keeps his tropes more philosophic than activist, more interrogative than axiomatic. His subject, the object, and the history of art are examined from an oblique, collapsible angle, from a point of view that looks askance at the so-called center of art, one sensitized to reproduction, its uses and abuses. Mischievous, not malicious or violent—although inspired by the ultra-iconic to the unorthodox, usually in some relationship to each other—his projects are wide-ranging and often appropriative, a copy, a copy of a copy, potentially ad infinitum, with modifications and interventions.
A beauty was the replica of Michelangelo’s David, painted gold, built out of thousands of foam layers from a 3D computer model and conceived for the 9th Istanbul Biennial. All that remains of it is the video of its construction and photographic documentation, since the sculpture crashed during installation. As a performance or an inquiry, its metaphoric possibilities were exponentially enriched by the mishap, which Özkaya took in stride, not wedded to the object or chagrinned by his lapse in engineering.
In a recent installation, Sudden Gust of Wind, based on Hokusai’s famous woodblock print and Jeff Wall’s staged photograph of it, Özkaya conflated these two celebrated images into his own memorable rendition. Constructed out of ordinary sheets of white paper, suspended in midair on invisible wire, the fragile, unsubstantial paper whirlwind was a succinct critique and emblem of bourgeois bureaucracy.
