“Hamle”, “The Move”

Exhibition curated by Başak Şenova featuring artists Adel Abidin, Runa Islam and Rosa Barba at Arter in Istanbul.

Austrian Author Stephan Zweig called his most famous novella “the Royal Game”. It is about a haunted soul having splitted its personality to I (white) and I (black) while playing chess games against himself. As a result of torture and isolation psychosis is the only way to excape from becoming inhumanized in the frame of this novella. Zweig finished it 1941 in Brasilian exile. It’s symbolism described the world in a fatal stage of madness.

In the exhibition “the move” the white sculptures of corpses seem to be part of an evil Royal game in an atmosphere of mass psychosis. The murder of Emos in Iraq moved Finnish-Iraqui artist Adel Abidin to create the Sculpture-based installation Symphony (of death).

In Abidin’s Video installation “Three Love Songs” Finnish actresses were filmed during a fake casting. They are singing pathetic nationalist poems in Arabic as if they would perform love songs. The lyrics were written by Saddam Hüsseyin during his dictatorship. The Finnish Singers are not aware of the content of the songs. The absurd setup creates the feeling in the audience of being part of a complex surrealist reality with isolated individuals having no plan to follow.

“Nevertheless, the curatorial methodology for this exhibition has been based on a calculated structure that extended its territories by referring to the game of chess”, underlines Curator Başak Şenova.

The audience sees three independed exhibitions of three artistst which are interrelated on different levels and based on a spatial axis on the ground floor, where all three are represented with their works. An exciting match to explore.