In Bloom : Elif Erkan

Titled IN BLOOM, the exhibition explores summer vacation and summer housing as a cultural invention specific to a certain period in the modernisation of Turkey, which holds together evolving concepts around work life balance,  performance and social class as well as land use and housing development as colonizing activities. 

Operating like an immersive installation, the exhibition is centered around a series of marble sculptures representing housing models in abstract, hollowed, uninhabited form to convey their detachment from ideas associated with “home”. In using marble, Erkan draws upon the material’s organic qualities and associations with both running water and kitchen and bathroom designs to turn domesticity inside out.The surrounding landscape paintings and puzzle pieces humourously expand on the threefold design quest modern summer housing projects must meet: the house must function as an object of speculation; it must be in proximity to beaches; it must have a view. The found landscape paintings these houses face are concealed behind rust and monochrome beige paint as a reference to the numbing repetition of the same, and temporal corrosion. Like obstructed windows, they turn the romantic idea of “looking inwards while looking out“ into a modernist abstraction achieved through the use of a facade technique used in construction, sgraffito, to scratch their surfaces. Fragmented images of domestic animals in idealized poses are at the heart of Erkan’s puzzle pieces where growth and decay are simultaneous as skin-like plasticine meets the puzzles and like a living organism, co-evolves with them, pointing to the seasonal adoption of pet animals, and their abandonment simultaneously. Large photographic prints from the artist’s own archive depicting abandoned summer houses, and garbage bins provide an immersive, documentarian backdrop to the installation. 

In the modernist project, while summer vacation was a means to engineer lifestyles and manage the productivity of the middle class work force through calculated relaxation times and leisure activities, the coastal construction boom was engineering the landscape, turning coastal land into building plots. Erkan’s installation activates this collective memory in Turkey, with strong affective ties to past dreams of modernity anchored in the bygone era of 1980s and 1990s liberal development policies, and the ensuing collective disillusionment.

Elif Erkan (b. 1985, Ankara, Turkey) lives and works in Vienna. 

Grounded in a process-oriented approach to sculpture and installation, Elif Erkan’s artistic practice focuses on the affective and psychological associations of traditional sculptural materials combined with everyday objects of contemporary consumerism in narrative constellations that bridge ancient mythologies and pop culture. Drawing from her background in photography, Elif Erkan’s process involves simultaneously the material event and the material documentation of the event.

Elif Erkan holds a BA from Städelschule Frankfurt (2013) and MFA from Otis College for Art and Design, Los Angeles (2016). Her solo exhibitions include La Bocca Della Vérita, Ve.sch Kunstverein (Vienna, 2023); What is it that possesses me? Weiss Berlin (Berlin, 2018); Bag Answers, Kunstverein Heidelberg (Heidelberg, 2017); Ex Oriente Lux, Park View (Los Angeles, 2016); Konzentration der Kräfte, Kunsthalle Portikus (Frankfurt, 2015) and M.E. - I like your backpack, WIELS (Brussels, 2014). She has participated in recent group shows such as Sculpture Garden, Geneva Biennale (Geneva, 2022); To Exhibit in Case of Emergency, Cité international des Arts (Paris, 2021); What Remains Is What The Poets Found, PS120 (Berlin, 2019); Work Loves Me, Lanserhaus (Bolzano, 2018); Paroxysm of Union, Kunsthalle Freeport (Athens, 2017) and Capital Debt, Territory, Utopia, Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin, 2016). Elif Erkan was the recipient of a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, with the Hessische Kulturstiftung Grant and in 2015-2016 she received the Villa Aurora Berlin fellowship with the DAAD Travel Grant USA.