All Saints
May 1 – June 6, 2021
Baris Gokturk's All Saints is a monument to the energetic release of street dancing in a time when the stakes of bodies in the street may never have felt higher. Composed of collaged images of dancers from 2020 block parties around New York City, the Turkish-born artist's home for the past twenty years, the piece is dense with figures in motion. Some are masked and some are unmasked, all are impossibly close together, even overlapping. When was the last we were close together like that? In the summer of 2020, when New York was the global epicenter of Covid-19, in spite of the threat of contagion, in spite of the fears of overwhelming the healthcare system, of infecting and possibly killing loved ones or neighbors, in spite of all of this people took their single, precious, vulnerable bodies into the streets and brought them dangerously near to other bodies in protest because the inequity of death was intolerable. If Breonna Taylor could be shot in her bed by invading police, if Ahmaud Arbery could be run down, if police officer could kneel for nine minutes on George Floyd's neck as he begged for air, death - and those who wield in the name of the state.- had to be confronted in the street.
At twenty-eight feet in length, All Saints is simaltaneously a barricade and a fragile veil. Strips of color composed of image transfers, ink, acrylic, pills of paper pulp and other debris are woven into an industrial netting and hoisted into the air where they buckle and sag.The size is imposing, but the tattered image is also thin, nearly transparent in places, like a broken panel of stained glass in a cathedral. Amidst the dancers, fireflies float like embers. As in Gokturk's Fires_Rot series, which tracks public space. like the blossoming fireworks that marked the summer of 2020 in urban spaces across America, these works ambiguously signal violence, resistance, or festivity.
The Feast of All Saints is a Christian holy day from which celebrations such as Halloween and Dia de Muertos derive, commemorating the saints and martyrs who are too numerous to name, including those whose names are unknown. We are still reciting the names of dead but the lists grow too long: Daunte Wright, Adam Toledo, Ma'Kiah Bryant. Yet even when reeling from incalcuable loss, a holiday is a celebration, an excuse to lose control in socially-sanctioned circumstances and good company, like some funerals. The figures in All Saints are joyful, but the joy is more incendiary than innocent. Like pressure or heat applied to a closed system, they are a bomb.
About the Artist
Baris Gokturk was born in Ankara, Turkey. He was recently an ApexArt fellow in Seoul, artist-in-residence at YADDO, and a participant in SOMA Mexico as well as Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Recent museum exhibitions include Pera Museum in Istanbul and SECCA in Winston-Salem, NC. He recently completed a mural for Columbia University’s Butler Library and a commission by the Public Art Fund as part of Art on the Grid. He finished a residency at LMCC Governors Island in 2020, and his debut solo show in New York could be seen at Helena Anrather Gallery in November 2020. Gokturk is currently working on upcoming projects in New York, Venice, and Eskisehir, Turkey. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn.