Halka Art Project to open exhibit on collectivity

OPENING today at 6:00 p.m., the exhibit “Maybe We Will Benefit from Our Neighbor’s Good Fortune” can be visited until Oct. 14 at the Halka Art Project, located in the Kadıköy district of Istanbul.

Curated by Işıl Eğrikavuk and coordinated by Jozef E. Amado, the exhibition will bring together the Istanbul-based art collectives dadans HAH and Pelesiyer, who are producing new works for this exhibition.

In addition, the video art collective “Artıkişler,” as well as the arts and ecology collective “Birbuçuk” and the Istanbul permaculture collective will present a program of parallel activities as part of the exhibition.

The display is an extension of the academic collaborations between Brighton University in the U.K. and Istanbul Bilgi University. The academic part of the project - titled “Aesthetics of Protest” - focuses on artistic production, political protests and the relationship between them.

Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the U.K., the exhibition brings together collectives that incorporate cooking, eating, cultivation, co-existence and the environment in their works, investigating the possibility that the arts, collective production, solidarity, cooking and cultivation, all of which further develop the “neighborhood” concept, can be considered as alternative ways to protest.

The exhibition presents examples of collective production and the concept of consuming in the arts as well as gastronomy and ecology, as opposed to individualism, aiming to utilize the exhibition space as a meeting point to generate dialogue with the locals.

In the scope of this concept, the activity program held in parallel will include various workshops on gardening and cooking.

The title of the exhibition comes from an old idiom in the Turkish language which says, “Komşuda pişer, bize de düşer,” or “One can benefit from the achievements and the abundance of his surrouding neighbours.” Referring to this idiom, the exhibition aims to question what it means to be a neighbor in terms of traditions as well as the current dynamics of solidarity, inviting the audience to be a part of an alternative model of communication and expression. The dadans collective will also present a performance today at the opening of the exhibition.