Flanged: YEŞİM AKDENİZ

Press release
Galerist is pleased to present Yeşim Akdeniz’s solo exhibition titled Flanged between May 7 and June 15, 2024.

In her art practice of over twenty years, Yeşim Akdeniz reinforces moments of conflict, cultural, and socio-political concepts with theories and places the objects they represent in her works with a semiotic technique, along with the help of dynamic painterly composition. In her productions in various mediums, from paintings to textile works and textile-silicon-metal assemblages, she uses a vocabulary of objects encoded with her personal symbolism that she has accumulated over the years to express social injustices created through gender inequalities, class, and racial differences

Upon close inspection of her works, which are soft, clean-cut, and of colours that are pleasing to the eye, containing objects that are well-designed or meticulously mimic existing designs, there is a conscious sense of disruption to this visual harmony; a sharp, ironic expression that conflicts with itself through the incorporated materials. It delivers the viewer from that first compassionate feeling to an uncanny feeling, the reality of the injustice they want to draw attention to.

In Yeşim’s artistic approach, attributing another meaning, whether in an abstract manner or by bringing together and constructing or placing ready-made objects, is an ongoing theme from her works on canvas to her recent textile and silicone works. The title of the exhibition Flanged is derived from a cylindrical construction material of German origin, flange, with claws that attach pipes and other structures going in different directions. Flanged appears in this context with an attributed meaning of being attached together. Yeşim's works are the construction of a new narrative structure in which various mediums come together and take on different meanings. In this exhibition, different materials such as silicone, textile, or metal are used to question the political, cultural, and social issues that the artist deals with.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue text by Elâ Atakan.