SANATORIUM presents Sergen Şehitoğlu's project “Seascapes (at lockdown)” between August 8 - 29 in the display window area at the entrance of the gallery space. The project can been seen from the display window during gallery's summer break while it's closed for visitors.
Taking its visual references from Hiroshi Sugimoto's “seascapes”, this pandemic series consists of the productions of participants showing performance upon the instruction delivered by Sergen Şehitoğlu.
This project keeps a record of the interactions with the 'sea' by participants showing performance such as Adnan Yerebakan, Ali İbrahim Öcal, Arda Behen, Burak Kabadayı, Doğa Okay, Ezgi Tok, Ilgın Seymen, Kerem Ozan Bayraktar and Yağız Özgen during the lockdown period in May 2021. Turning into a desire during the lockdown, the 'sea' is presented to the audience in this combined (-fragmented) visual, with the help of a common skyline.
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The formal fragmentation of the visual indicates the experience of the participants and the big visual that is formed covers the display window of the gallery as a seascape that was not experienced but imagined by Sergen Şehitoğlu.
When did I last time stand at a point where I saw the sea meet the sky; how many times in my life did I stand like this? How many times did I look at the sunrise, the sunset, the passing of time, wait for the midday sun to pass? Standing, looking and waiting; these are what I do in front of a seascape. I have looked at a landscape where the sky meets the sea many times in my short life. My memory is full, but most of these moments are from the times when I didn't even have a phone to record them; memories from such a long time ago. Perhaps, because this seascape devoid of the wideness that creates the magic of the landscape doesn't suggest to open up a world of imagination with its fractured state, what I had thought about first becomes the experience of unrecordable wideness.
Ilgın Seymen