Serkan Ozkaya at Galerist

Serkan Ozkaya, an Istanbul-based artist who is also pursuing a Ph.D. in German studies, showed a number of his offbeat, post-Duchampian projects in a recent exhibition that coincided with the Istanbul Biennial. Conceptually oriented, the nine works, dated from 1996 to 2003, varied in medium and materials, including found objects, rubber, metallic plates, photography and video. Ozkaya's gently ironic themes circle around the unique and the copy, authorship, authenticity and capitalist networks. An art for our sake, his work is clearly not commercial, although it was shown in the Istanbul equivalent of a Chelsea white box, serving more as a philosphical inquiry, an offhand utopian adumbration. Called "Minerva Street," the show had for its announcement a photo of that nondescript London road, "Big Car, Little Dick" scrawled on the wall beneath the street sign--a revised, postmodernist appraisal of manhood perhaps, or even a low-tech, anti-imperialist slogan. The "little dick" reappeared in the show itself as a tiny, detumescent rubber penis parked discreetly on a wall, looking like a wad of pink bubblegum. Ozkaya finds material everywhere; his quirky stream-of-critique makes provocative connections as he interrogates received situations and contexts.

Another work in the show consisted of several variously sized "gold" and "silver" panels called "Mysterious Paintings." Placed strategically throughout the gallery, they maintained a somewhat diffident presence. They seemed to function mainly as catalysts, enigmatic nonentities that reflected the room, other works and the viewer in their polished surfaces, their images in flux, their value a question: how much is faux gold or silver (and a reflection) worth? Another installation consisted of an upside-down reproduction of the Mona Lisa above a vitrine. Inside, there was a letter to Pierre Rosenberg of the Louvre requesting permission to hang the Leonardo icon upside down, along wiith the addressee's courteous, brief, irrelevant reply. A video, Pablo Picasso at the Museum of Modern Art 1998 (B.C.), presents Ozkaya in a wheelchair pushed by a friend to a spot before Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, where the artist slips on a mask of Picasso's face in an appropriative, resistant gesture.

While Ozkaya's work often refers to art and its conundrums, Proletarier aller Lander addresses another issue. It's a sequence of Iris prints made from photographs of hundreds of minuscule red plastic foam figures affixed to the floor. Depending upon your point of view, Ozkaya's installation either cited the trampling of the working classes or their resilience and ultimate power, always springing back, indestructible. The stunner of the show, however, was Lives and Works in Utrecht (Large Glass), an impressively scaled photograph of the facade of a Utrecht art institution. Brilliantly lighted from within, the building's enormous glass windows were tiled with thousands and thousands of colored photo transparencies, the ultimate collaboration. Conceptually taut, a copy of copies that made up an original, the work's glittering, stained-glass-like surface was also gorgeous to look at. [A version of it is coming to Exit Art in New York sometime this year.] Although scattershot in its appoach, "Minerva Street" possessed charm and a wry, quick intelligence.

--Lily Wei

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