Reading the Artist #2 | Robert Mapplethorpe

Reading the Artist #2 | Robert Mapplethorpe: "Love, Ego, God"

Metehan Törer & Can Akgümüş

24.12.2021, Friday 7.30pm

Content Warning: This event is suitable for +18 and may contain nudity, sexuality, and pornographic material. Book for free below! Participation is limited to 25 people due to the Covid-19.

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“Much has been said about Robert, and more will be added. Young men will adopt his gait. Young girls will wear white dresses and mourn his curls. He will be condemned and adored. His excesses damned or romanticized. In the end, truth will be found in his work, the corporeal body of the artist. It will not fall away. Man cannot judge it. For art sings of God, and ultimately belongs to him.”

- Patti Smith, Just Kids

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Metehan Törer, moderated by Can Akgümüş, conducts the second artist reading in Ka on Robert Mapplethorpe, one of the most important artists of the twentieth century with his provocative and powerful works.

Reading the Artist event aims to give a more holistic look at what artists produce. Selected artists are not judged solely by their work; instead, we “read” them by considering their writings, drawings, and all the details about their lives, and also regarding the conditions of the period while they created their artistic works.

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This event is funded by the International Relief Fund for Organisations in Culture and Education 2021 of the German Federal Foreign Office, the Goethe-Institut and other partners: www.goethe.de/relieffund #irf2021 @gi_ankara @goetheinstitut

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Metehan Törer was born in 1990 in Ankara, Turkey. He graduated from Hacettepe University Fine Arts Faculty Ceramics Department between 2014-2018. During this period, he was in Tallinn with the Erasmus exchange program at the Estonian Academy of Arts, Ceramics Department (2016-2017). Between 2018-2021, he gave his master's degree with a thesis at Hacettepe University Fine Arts Institute Ceramics Department. He wrote his thesis on “The Search of Fluidity in The Discussion of Sexuality And Identity In Art” and studied this subject.

While creating sculptures by using ceramic as the main material, I am also integrating ready materials such as drawings and found objects into my works and installations. In these works, I focus on the metamorphosis of figurative and daily objects; genderlessly defined characters behave in flippant, depressive, ironic, twisted and incoherent ways and autobiographic elements derived from my personal experiences. All these carries the witnessed world into a new universe to discuss the artistic processes through it. In this new universe even colourful, lively, seductive or cheerful looking objects are conceptually constructed through in-explicitly told short stories that are painful, suicidal, obsessive and fetishist. Objects in my works generally repeat themselves in time-independent and never-ending cycles and they seem to resists these cycles just like souls and bodies trapped in the infinitive and painful loops of the underworld. They narrate their own experiences and while being trapped in this hell-like third world, the objects find their own characters.

Can Akgümüş (1987, Ankara) studied economy in Selcuk University Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences. He uses photography as a tool to detect the cycle of the process of recording the apparent reality, and reproduction of it in relation to the memory, history and society. He aims to build an original way of expression while searching for the boundaries of photography through various methods of collage art. While he produces his artworks through frequent travels in order to make distant and interpretive observations on the impacts of memory, city life and the natural cycle of it on individuals, he also tries to discover new ways of connections between the individual and the collective memory. He lives and works in Ankara and Istanbul. He is also working as the director of Evliyagil Museum which is a contemporary art museum based in Ankara, Turkey.