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Lot Essay
Burçak Bingöl explores notions of belonging, cultural heritage, identity, decoration, and failure by blurring the boundaries between these seemingly distinct concepts. Working across various media including ceramics and photography and through her labour-intensive process of tracing, copying, and re-forming, Bingöl adopts an analytical approach to new artistic configurations. Acting as psychological landscapes that hover between abstraction and representation, rejection and preservation, Bingöl’s works simultaneously embrace and challenge Eastern and Western traditions.
The Avatar series re-evaluates time and space through the artist’s concept of ‘rooting’, and looks closely at what grows out of the ground. The series was inspired by conditions of the Covid pandemic that at once imprisoned and distanced the human body from where it lives and breathes, all while our online avatars were able to access far corners of the world. Avatar: İstanbul Root – Surrender features images of roses, redbuds and wisteria that Bingöl collected from various parks around the city, intricately glazed onto ceramic panels. Together, the blossoms, leaves and tendrils settle into the silhouetted form of the artist herself. Inspired by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s writings—and in particular the alternative forms of association explored in his novel Teslim, text from which Bingöl has woven within the flowers—the artist ultimately draws upon the relationship between ‘root’ and ‘body’ through the history, literature and flora of Istanbul.
Born in Görele and raised in Ankara, Burçak Bingöl now lives and works in Istanbul. Her works are held in private and public collections across the United States, Europe and the Middle and Far East, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. She is represented by Zilberman Gallery, Istanbul and Berlin.
The Avatar series re-evaluates time and space through the artist’s concept of ‘rooting’, and looks closely at what grows out of the ground. The series was inspired by conditions of the Covid pandemic that at once imprisoned and distanced the human body from where it lives and breathes, all while our online avatars were able to access far corners of the world. Avatar: İstanbul Root – Surrender features images of roses, redbuds and wisteria that Bingöl collected from various parks around the city, intricately glazed onto ceramic panels. Together, the blossoms, leaves and tendrils settle into the silhouetted form of the artist herself. Inspired by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s writings—and in particular the alternative forms of association explored in his novel Teslim, text from which Bingöl has woven within the flowers—the artist ultimately draws upon the relationship between ‘root’ and ‘body’ through the history, literature and flora of Istanbul.
Born in Görele and raised in Ankara, Burçak Bingöl now lives and works in Istanbul. Her works are held in private and public collections across the United States, Europe and the Middle and Far East, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. She is represented by Zilberman Gallery, Istanbul and Berlin.