Callirrhoë would like to draw your attention to the very first solo show of Nasan Tur in Athens, Greece on June 9th 2023. Callirrhoë will present four artworks which represent Tur’s broad multidisciplinary artistic practice. Through the selected works, Tur explores notions of vulnerability, memory and resistance. Nasan Tur’s work comments both directly and indirectly on the conflicts and failures of ideologies and thereby addressing social struggles. In spite of their political and social topics, his works are often humorous, astounding and sometimes shocking. He questions established stereotypes and how each individual finds ways to reinvent realities. Tur depicts concrete images, almost mundane and specifically unspecific, explicit yet ambiguous.

Within the video work “Memory as Resistance” Nasan Tur outlines the performative act of tracing memory. Point of departure consists of portrait pictures of journalists murdered because of their investigative and non-conformist work within political systems. Crumbling photographs remind the spectator of an act of removing the image, as if erasing a memory from one’s mind. In another act, Tur straightens them flat again, almost lovingly stroking the paper, revealing the disappearing journalists. With each repetition the paper decays more, just like a fading memory, but ever present - memorizing the past as a decision to remember and not to forget as a form of resistance. It is an act balanced between destruction and restoration, something that can be found in the monumental carpet work too.

The bodies are not explicitly explored due to their vulnerable status but they are simultaneously presented for their material condition.When tracing back cultural narratives, it can also be a painful exposure of inherited structures. Tur exposes ornamental structures by burning woven textures. Burned traces of our inherited past, exposing structures all in a brutal way by using fire to expose the truth, hidden behind ornaments, our cultural narrative, not only memorizing the beautiful and colorful stories but also the dark side.

For the artwork “Variationen von Kapitalismus” (variations of capitalism) Nasan Tur had a programmed algorithm determine over 41,000 spelling variations of the word capital in German (Kapital), which phonetically sound like "capital". The artist has so far drawn several hundred variations of it with Indian ink on handmade Tibetan paper. Each drawing is unique, dated and signed by the artist. This way of producing stands in harsh contrast to what is commonly understood when speaking about capitalism. It is about the interplay of machine work and manual labor, the criticism of mass production. At the same time it challenges our belief systems around concepts of labour, quality and the arbitrariness of all political systems.

The work "Fragments" opposes the loss of historical artefacts. The invisibility of something that used to be there becomes the focus. Individuals stole body parts of statues "such as heads, hands, fingers and feet in order to offer them for sale", as the artist explains. The historical statues can be "considered contemporary witnesses to economic crises, social change and religious fanaticism." Nasan Tur remakes missing body parts as a form of artistic resistance – and they are not just anonymous reproductions, but replicas of his very own body parts. Through this process, the newly created individual parts not only become autonomous sculptures, but what has been lost becomes apparent in our consciousness again.

Nasan Tur (born 1974 in Offenbach) participated in documenta14, in the 10. Istanbul Biennale and in the 6. Taipei Biennale and exhibited in numerous institutions like Palais de Tokyo, Centre Pompidou Paris, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Hamburger Bahnhof Berlin,  Städel Museum Frankfurt, Maxxi Museum Rome. In 2012 he was awarded the Will Grohmann Prize of the Academy of Arts, Berlin and 2014 the Villa Massimo Prize of the Deutsche Akademie Rom. Nasan Tur currently holds a professorship at the post-graduate program Spacial Strategies at Weißensee Academy of Art, Berlin. His solo exhibition titled “Hunted” at the Berlinische Galerie, Berlin will be on view until 01 April 2024.