Surreal House : Group Show

It is in discovery alone, that one recognizes the marvelous

headlong rush of desire. It alone can enlarge the universe.

You only have to know how to get along in the labyrinth.

Interpretative delirium begins only when man, ill prepared,

Is taken by a sudden fear in the forest of symbols.

What attracts me in such a manner of seeing is that,

as far as the eye can see, it recreates desire.

Andre Breton, Mad Love, 1934.

Surreal House explores the power and mystery of the house in our collective imagination. This multi-disciplinary and cross generational project explores the central importance of the house within contemporary art through the lens of surrealism and its legacies by bringing together artists, poets, architects and designers…whom works inform each other through an accumulative scenography and poetic contamination. A vessel for dreams, fears and desires, the Surreal House is everything the functional house of the XX.th century modernism isn’t. 

At the intersection of the mind and architecture, the unconscious and real space, the house has a particularly rich network of meanings. Gaston Bachelard said of the house it is “one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind”. Many artists from Edward Kienholz to Ilya & Emilia Kabakov testify to the influence surrealism has had on artists from both sides of the Atlantic since the early 60’s. 

By recreating a temporary home, the exhibition invites the viewer to an experimental journey in a labyrinthine scenery mirroring a collector’s interior and mind. In the surreal house, pursuing surrealists’ movement in seeing the house as a metaphor for the imagination and the unconscious itself, the challenge has been to hold in balance dualities such as the least conceptual and the theatrical, the most retinal and the least retinal, the dark and the light…a composite visual “cadavre exquis” in the search of the missing object.

Artists
Avni Arbas – Babi Badalov - Raphaël Barontini - Neil Beloufa- Abidin Dino - Nejat Devrim - Max Ernst - Ayse Erkmen - Bedri Rahmi Eyüboglu - Daniel Firman- Atilla & Filiz Ozguven Galatali- Leylâ Gediz- Douglas Gordon- Selma Gürbüz - Linder- Eva Nielsen- Jill Magid - Marcel Mariën - Thomas Mailender - Hubert Marot - Ahmet Ögüt - Alex Palenski - Elsa Sahal - Apolonia Sokol- George Tony Stoll - Ali Emir Tapan- Marion Verboom – Guy Yanai