The Things Behind Our Darkness

Necmi Sönmez, PhD
Independent Curator
Duesseldorf, August 2023
translated by Zeynep Nur Ayanoglu

Merve Şendil, who uses many techniques simultaneously in her works, especially oil on canvas, photography and installation, interprets the concepts she handles in layers to provide the viewer with an imagery loaded with riddles. Merve’s solo show titled The Things Behind Our Darkness reveals a crucial resorting point in her visual journey that she has developed since the 2000s, as well as the conceptual components that can be described as Merve Mythology in a sense. Whereas the world of gods that we encounter in Greek and Roman mythologies refers to universal phenomena, Merve Mythology has a feature that conveys the artist’s struggle against the meaninglessness in daily life with abstract and concrete elements based on her own world of perception. In the series of oil on canvas and lace paintings in the exhibition, the viewer encounters “visual codes” that can be interpreted upon seeing and reading. This point marks the moment in which Merve Mythology makes itself visible, crystalizing the playful attitude (Femina Ludens) that the artist takes on by assuming all the responsibility in the face of “realities of life” when transitioning from youth to maturity.

 

Whereas the prominent images in the canvas series, all of which consist of intense oil paint on 2x2 cm squares, lean on the artist’s “personal” world of perception, the words in the lace series refer to “collective” moods. Merve’s interest in words and writing has manifested itself throughout the Underscene Project [*] series she has been developing since 2007. This archive, which focuses on music projects that have not been released for sale with a label, sheds light on the efforts of various underground bands as well as young people looking for their own form of expression. In her Collected Writings series based on this archive, Merve focuses on the protest of the songs in her collection and interprets words or idioms with fragmented meanings using the lace technique. With this approach, expressions subjected to various processes of social oppression rise to the surface, and the meaning in the background of her works, as in the images in her paintings, constructs its existence on an abstract ground. This challenging way of existence reveals the attitude of Merve Mythology, in which she does not hesitate to bring opposites together.

The show The Things Behind Our Darkness is based on visual and emotional contrasts that refer to the inner voices of individuals. Those who wish to grasp them need to get out of particular personal and social shells. In this way, the viewer shall discover that “darkness", the starting point of the exhibition, is actually a metaphor. The exhibition, in which images that open the back door of the visible come to the fore, has the courage to reveal the search for freedom of a generation that, with the help of words and images, is constantly required to search for new forms of stance in the face of political and social developments. Courage, indeed, because presenting lace technique with song murmurs, and pixel experiences with baroque frames is as difficult as trying to swim when there is no light source other than sea sparkles. At
this point, Merve makes us feel that she proceeds fearlessly in all of her works on display.

*Merve Şendil, who has been interested in non-mainstream music genres since her student years, started to create her archive within the scope of Underscene in 1998. The archive, which includes all kinds of recordings that are not in professional circulation, brings together many different musicians and offers a reference for Turkey’s alternative musical culture.