True Love Leaves No Traces

Galerist is happy to present the group exhibition ‘True Love Leaves No Traces,’ curated by Burcu Fikretoğlu, on display from February 8th to March 26th, 2022. The exhibition takes its title from a poem by Leonard Cohen that serves as an invitation to rethink the desire of “being one”, the game of assimilation we play with ourselves as we fail to envision ways to coexist in the same space at the same time. The lines “True love leaves no traces / If you and I are one / It's lost in our embraces” try to mark the gaps behind this fantasy throughout the exhibition.

‘True Love Leaves No Traces’ approaches the questions and issues associated with hospitality not within an axis of tradition and ownership or in the context of hierarchy, but instead through an unconditional acceptance for the uninvited and unexpected, taking into account all the risks and acknowledging the traces they will leave; the exhibition evaluates the approach of allowing contact with the unknown as the sole method of coexistence.

Anri Sala’s video titled ‘If and Only If’ depicts a utopian relationship between two actors, a musician and a snail, sharing a viola as a common space, and is among the starting points that form the backbone of the exhibition. This duality is further discussed throughout the exhibition within different surfaces, through other relationships or their lack thereof: in Claire Denis’ film ‘L’Intrus’, inspired by Jean-Luc Nancy’s autobiographical text of the same title, it is pondered upon following the story of a man in need of a heart transplant and his unsuccessful attempts at establishing a dialogue with himself, his heart, his home, others and his past; the distance between human and nature and their contiguity with the photographs of Silva Bingaz and the dissolving borders between all animate beings that Necla Rüzgar wanders through. The sculpture of Kiki Smith which extends hands, the organ of touch and thought, with bird feathers and Kostis Velonis’s failed couple Apollo and Daphne also spread open various layers of this duality.

Hale Tenger's new installation produced for the exhibition ‘True Love Leaves No Traces’ features a cubic form made of silk fabrics. Inside this cube, another silk fabric floats up and down in an endless loop, each fall synced with a tune extracted from Leonard Cohen’s song titled ‘Happens to the Heart’. The repetition of this melody at regular intervals and the movements of the fabrics suggest the routine of the heart, a life-pumping machine entrapped within the rib cage, its subjection; while fostering thoughts on the heaviness of ambiguity and the cycle between dreams and disillusions, through a proposition of permeable mobility and lightness, it poses questions on all the possible distances and the potentialities of coexistence offered by the space it is installed within.

In Alfredo Jaar’s work, Lucio Fontana is shown standing alone in the ruins of his post-war studio, reflecting on what could be re-established and how, by revealing what is left of a city whose memory has been destroyed departing from its traces and gaps. Stefania Strouza’s ceramic sculptures that resemble meteorites are spread throughout the exhibition space, reminding us of a universe – that instead of the illusion of a commanding domination over, we are a part of - constantly intruding, being disrupted, torn and scattered.

While the sunken furnitures of Ariana Papademetropoulos focus on the idea of ‘being-with,’ departing from thoughts on home and closure, the amorphous ceramic sculptures in Ismene King’s installation carry the world’s traces onto a table, discussing how a shared existence can be translated into coexistence in the world, beyond a house of residence.

The idea that microscopic traces on surfaces – which have recently entered our lives in novel ways – connect and expose bodies, objects, the world and even beyond, still continues to redefine the relationship we establish with touch. That which is invisible to the naked eye has profoundly changed our social existence and association to animate and inanimate objects, while strengthening our awareness of our own permeability, vulnerability, and sensitivity, perhaps more than ever. Inviting to reconsider the desire to be whole with the other, to become unlimited, to cover eternity and eliminate all distances, departing from the body, the border of which is assumed to be the skin, the exhibition opens to discussion the thoughts of the inside and outside on different levels.

'True Love Leaves No Traces' is the third and final meeting point of a series of exhibitions and an ongoing research on the concepts of absence, presence, image and tactility, that originated at SIGNS in 2019.