Perceiving the City as a Frame
Of course, living in a city does not mean knowing and internalizing every part of it to the same extent. Moreover, if the city is a megapolis, it is not possible to perceive the whole city and attribute a total meaning to it. Because it is an area where extremely different forms of construction, different living conditions, different purposes and even different cultures come side by side. No precise geographical boundaries can be drawn between these segregated areas in the city, nor can clear classifications be made in terms of cultural belonging.
Every day, urban dwellers leave their own neighborhoods and set out for other places, meeting in anonymous intersections and flowing all over the place by private or public transportation, and after a while, they return to their own neighborhoods by taking the same routes again. As a result, the perception of the city begins to turn into a road adventure for each urbanite; thus, urbanites form their own commonalities through the intermediate places on the routes they pass through. What they see in the city is almost like what a passing stranger sees during his journey: A series of images, fragmented, lacking unity of meaning, one after the other…
For example, when we look at Ahmet Elhan’s works, we see that each of them consists of some details of the city. The “things” in these photographs have been transmitted to us from the artist’s own city, whereas they have been fragmented by the interventions they have undergone, and then those fragments have re-formed causeless relationships among themselves and have become quite distant from their true-whole form. These urban fragments, no longer clear where they are, what they represent and what significance they have been assigned by the artist, can only be grasped by small clues of their blurred appearance, and they pass quickly before the eyes, adding to each other. These images, dispersed and merged in colors, lights, forms, reflect the most familiar views of the city, and these views are nothing more than momentary and transient impressions. We watch these fragmented and multiplied landscapes every day as we hurry through the city or travel fast.
Rüçhan Şahinoğlu, on the other hand, approaches the city in a different manner… He does not talk about the scattered perception of the city dweller who has to travel constantly, or about the vague, blurred urban fragments that pass before his eyes during a fast travel. In these paintings there is no speed, but on the contrary, there is stopping and looking carefully at the details of the city. In a way, Rüçhan Şahinoğlu’s aim is to return those urban particles that have become indistinct back to their original forms and to distill and present each image that is mixed with each other. As the images are distilled in these paintings, the frames of the city begin to become clear again. However, these frames are far from revealing the unique identity of a city and the character of its life, because they are what can be seen in the anonymous in-between places of every city. For example, monotonous rows of building facades, electrical transformers, street lamps starting from the inner city and extending to the highways, etc… Although these pictures do not seem to give an idea about a city, we watch the landscapes made of these “things” every day.
In this exhibition, Ahmet Elhan and Rüçhan Şahinoğlu reveal the perceptions of a city dweller in the face of these landscapes rather than directly reflecting urban landscapes. After all, doesn’t the image of a city depend on how we perceive it? Le Corbusier, for example, said that the view of Paris in the modern era was now as visible as the frames perceived through automobile windows. This exhibition sees and defines a city precisely through those frames.
