ART-PRESENTATION: Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin-Democratic luxury

Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin was one of the most inscrutable artists on the Turkish art scene. Ever since the early 90s when he started exhibiting in the local İstanbul galleries until his untimely death he engaged in complex postcolonial critical reflections on the historic, cultural and social issues. In 2007, he represented Turkey in the 52nd Venice Biennial with his installation “Don’t Complain”.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: M HKA Archive

The exhibition “Democratic luxury” is a major retrospective of his practice, bringing together works produced during the two decades either side of the new millennium. Starting in the early ‘90’s, Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin focused on an artistic production that explored the effects of globalization, immigration and exile, cross cultural image circulation and anonymous production through travel, personal histories and archives. His cross‐referential work, consisting of photo‐installations, collages, videos, objects, and once in collaboration with the Irish artist Michael Morris the “Turk Truck”, a life‐size truck overloaded with colorful plastic soccer balls, represent a multi‐layered, complex visual language. He was an artist that saw the profound effects of global capitalism on the everyday, observing the movement of people and products across geographies, particularly in the period following the collapse of the Soviet Union. He himself was also a traveller, studious of forms of feral capitalism surging from places considered the fringes of western modernity. It is the signifiers and remnants of all this – traces of the burgeoning effects of mobility, trade and image circulation, that he used as the materials for his art-making, as a means for contemplating what it all represented. The exhibition aims to take us deeper into the thought-processes of the artist through the inclusion of a selection of studies, drawings and notes from his archive and his collaborative initiatives with other artists such as the Bunker Research Group, the Barn Research Group and the Sea Elephant Travel Agency.

Info: Curator: Nav Haq, M HKA – Museum of Contemporary Art Antwer, Leuvenstraat 32, Antwerp, Duration: 16/10/15-31/1/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00–18:00, Thu 11:00–21:00, www.muhka.be