Kemal Özen presents images that once again touch our personal histories and reminds us of ourselves in his exhibition “Be a Good Boy, Blossom with Your Pain” which is quoted from recently passed away poet Ahmet Erhan’s poem; “Zamanı Oy, Sesini Sakla”. Özen’s works depicts our lives cornered by social rules, deficient ambitions, desires that we have to hide and our crippled childhoods.
According to Kemal Özen, this exhibition is sort of a seismographic output of social loneliness and the feeling of desperation: “The established system in societies raises the individual starting from infancy with a pattern of nuncupative rules ranging from how to dress and it categorizes names according to the issues of gender, how to act, to the choice of colours of their clothes. Someone is always exemplified as a good kid. We are asked to behave according to “that” example. The system excludes the ones that digress that pattern, regards them as the other. This exhibition can be summarized as the manifestation of the mental state that has been constituted in the individual who feels like the “other” who cannot find someone to share his/her opinions in the geography that he/she lives in, thinks and looks different and forces him/herself to act “normal” and hides his/her own personality because of the social pressure, and experience this situation through the image.
Kemal Özen’s “Be a Good Boy, Blossom with Your Pain” exhibition can be visited in Sanatorium between the dates 23th of October -24th of November 2013.