Kısmet

THE PILL® is pleased to announce Özlem Altın’s first solo show in Istanbul in parallel to the 16th Istanbul Biennale and the artist's participation in the 59th Venice Biennale.

Over the past couple of years, Altın has developed a technique of painting upon assembled photographs. The surface texture of ink and oil surrounds and outlines discrete objects in a range of images putting them in contact with one another. These marks are distinctly hand painted, at odds with the visual mechanics of the photographic medium. Yet in her work, this schism, or sensory gap between touch and vision is complicated by a fragmentary use of pictures of bodies, and most symbolically, of hands. In a few of her new pieces, many of these hands already existing in anterior works reappear almost ritualistically, as reminding the viewer of the plasticity of time. Here, the tangible is felt through the received knowledge of a holy relic. It is synonymous with being touched throughout time. What is at stake, is the intangible metaphysicality of time and its representation, at times vertical, at times horizontal, at times bent.

Altın’s contouring of images dissolve the border between the animate and the artifact. In several works that have been treated with blue oil paint, the arrangement of isolated images – often taken from black-and-white and inverted photographs – shares more in common with physical forms of language, or perhaps Susan Sontag's description of photography as 'a grammar'.1 In this sense, Altın reinscribes the photographic image as a writing system. The outlines of hands and a figure in Wheel or cycle (when time flies out the window), 2022, for instance, are rendered in such a way that they resemble script, or the shape of a hieroglyph. Altın’s invented visual language is secretive and, at times, riddling. On the right-hand side of this same piece are a cluster of shapes that appear to be a pinwheel, a fan, or a sprouting plant form. Yet their specificity is less important than the associations implied by the objects, which call to mind other cyclical entities, such as chakras or the swirling mass of people that circle the Ka’bah, and that from a distance, reminds of a spiral galaxy. It’s no stretch of the imagination to then equate the centripetal with the revolution of planets in a solar system – one celestial body orbiting a greater one.

Perhaps another way of imagining the resonance between things is ‘Kismet’. The title of Altın’s show imbues her work with a supernatural notion of fate, creating space to think of connectivity to a cosmic degree. In Pulse and grief (encapsulated, reactivated), 2022, her unifying use of blue is explicitly pronounced against a plane of corporal red. Sinewy, ectoplasmic strands exude from and move into every image, which include plants, the faces of members of her family, and hands pinching skin or grabbing each other tightly. The connective tissue here, however, is more visceral because the overall composition resembles nervous tissue under a microscope. Laced within this anatomical universe, Altın’s images are residual, like pain or memory: vestiges of the past contained inside a body on a cellular level. From outer space to inner, macro to micro, her work is littered with the remnants of knowledge that emerge from an archaeology of imagery.