January 24, 2024, 3 pm
Many thanks to the gallery director Dr. Lotte Laub & program manager Lusin Reinsch introducing our participants to the concept, program & history of Zilberman and guiding us through the solo exhibitions Namelessform by Memed Erdener & Dust and Mold by Eşref Yıldırım. The visit is part of the BAI Studio Program | Berlin Artist Residency, Art School, Arts Incubator, and Live Online Courses & Classes.
Exhibition Date: December 15, 2023 – February 10, 2024
Location: Zilberman | Berlin
Opening Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 11 AM – 6 PM
Address: Schlüterstraße 45, 10707 Berlin
“In his previous exhibition, Memed Erdener had set up utopian ministries and committees that create the feeling of “another possible world” and turned them into signboards. Let us remember: “Bureau for Registering the Sufferings Caused by Former Governments”, “Chamber of Making Peace with the Past” or “Private Secretariat for Liberating the Body from God”. These slogan-signboards, evocative of Kafka and Tanpinar in parts, were almost chanting for imagining a new country in the future and establishing a different culture and politics. In this exhibition, the opposite is the case: ‘Namelessform’s are silent, sentence-less, nameless and “mute”. But Memed added a few poetic sentences regarding his intentions with these forms. The cool subversiveness of these forms and sentences triggers the feeling of some ‘transgressive/modernist’ writers who have a problem with language and culture itself. Mentioning those writers and sentences here does not aim to give a name to these ‘namelessforms’, but to form a “clique” that also includes writing and to close the ranks…
The video I Love Myself shows the artist, Eşref Yıldırım, standing before a mirror in the bathroom and repeating the phrases: “I love myself, I am precious, I am valuable” – while vehemently scrubbing himself with a brush full of toothpaste. Yıldırım thus turns to persiflage the self-healing advice of a psychologist, whom he visited after his partner left him. Moreover, he reads old letters to himself in front of the mirror, in which his former boyfriend accuses him of egotism. Getting angrier and angrier, he succumbs to a paroxysm of self-blame and does physical and emotional harm to himself. The video oscillates between parody and bitter earnest, between violence and comedy, then compulsive self-optimization and self-punishment and self-therapy…” (Text excerpts from the press releases by courtesy of Zilberman gallery)
