Casting the Circle: Mükerrem Tuncay, Romina Meriç, Luna Ece Bal

Galerist is pleased to present “Casting the Circle”, a group exhibition curated by Aslı Seven with works by three young female artists, Mukerrem Tuncay, Romina Meric and Luna Ece Bal between the dates 14 July – 13 August 2016.

The exhibition’s title refers to the multiple meanings associated with the act of casting: casting a mold to give form to matter, casting a spell or cards to see and effect the future, casting actors to play out a role, or casting a net to abstract a meaningful portion from the wider expanse of reality. Casting a circle is then to draw an impassable spatial and temporal limit that suspends the acquired knowledge of reality (i.e. common sense) to suggest alternate modes of producing meaning and action; while at the same time it refers to contemporary eco-feminist revaluations of practices of magic and witchcraft.

The circle that is cast by each one of these three artists acts as a hole within the fabric of the real. The works in the exhibition propose metamorphic relationships between altered states of consciousness, sleep and wakefulness, science and magic, human body parts and elements of landscape. In her video “Great Depression”, Mukerrem Tuncay, with a single gesture, tears a hole on a mattress and on the fabric of her own consciousness and delves into the other side of sleep where decomposition, rebirth and nourishment coexist. Romina Meric’s paintings suggest morphological parallels between landscape and human body parts, where wounds drawn in the flesh unite the body of the earth and that of female figures in a surreal atmosphere. Luna Ece Bal’s “Magic on Paper” series links traditions of witchcraft to modern science as her water-marbled black circles on paper evoke forms of stem cell imagery and address questions of reclaimed female reproduction and creativity.