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In her exhibition a fine line, Seçil Yaylalı features a loop between fantasy and reality. The artist invites the audience to play with the toys which make strange noises in motion. As visitors leave the world of toys behind and move through the exhibition space, they encounter the artist’s unfiltered and sincere reality.

 

Creation process is fun, but is it pure joy? The exhibition negotiates the fine line between today's reality and the fictional world, between play and life, between the joy and pain of creation.

 

The idea for the exhibition comes from a colourful toy shop in a very busy underpass in Istanbul, where the people around it move even more crazily than the toys inside. The artist recreates a part of the store in the gallery space to show the fantastic reality of space and time. She also draws attention to the similarity of the toys' movements with our own during the pandemic within four walls. Or the fact that we know what is going on in the world, such as the climate crisis, war and famine, but we continue to live in the same rhythm as if nothing is happening. The audience can go deeper into the artist's fiction, as they can place any of the toys as they wish. Unleashing her inner world, she builds and disassembles her artist self like a jigsaw puzzle, revealing her most sensitive and even dark sides in the exhibition.

 

 

Seçil Yaylalı is a visual artist and educator based in Orta San Giulio (IT) and Istanbul (TR). She mainly works in the field of socially engaged art, engaging/collaborating with several social groups in different contexts. Her projects deal with the desires and longings of people. She fosters collective production as a shared experience that leads groups to reach a common aim. She is engaged in ongoing curatorial work for PASAJ, which she co-founded, by running an independent project space and an artist residency program in Istanbul. www.secilyaylali.com

 

Zeynep Okyay is a curator and cultural worker. In her research practice, she explores the possibilities of collective work and and uses the dictionary form as a tool to trace social structures and experience sharing to generate new forms of expression. Okyay is one of the co-founders of PASAJ. www.zynpokyay.com