Designed and built by the y o ğ u n l u k art initiative, the installation isolates Kasa Galeri’s existing memory from historicity and explores new meanings that be found for spatial regime. ‘’MEDIUM’’ reveals the framework of the relationship between artist-work of art and the viewer, articulating the connection between thought and form onto the receptive process of the viewer. As a concept, ‘’Medium’’ means instrument, intermediary, intervening substance, channel; here in its artistic context, it creates the enviroment that is necessary for the work of art to materialize. The viewer becomes a component of ‘’MEDIUM’’ and gains the quality of a form in an atmospheric setting where subject and object, fiction and reality constantly change place and evolve into each other. The entrance to Kasa Glaer feels like a vestibule... a gap, a threshold, while medium opens the doors to an experience where now and here are transformed along Gestalt procesess.

 

 

I am far from the chaos above.

Even though I know that I am in the depths of a bank building that joins two busy streets in the center of Karaköy.

The entrance to the vault feels like a vestibule...

The door is ajar.

This is either someplace I've never been before, or a place that I remember to consist of three adjoining sections.

As I step through an old vault door, I notice a blob of darkness towards the far end of the first section, which is dim in itself. It's a hurdle...

There is a screen in the middle of it. Is Medium imagined as a separator "positioned between" two sections, or is it the screen itself that materializes as the "medium form"?

Then, because I'm not aware I will realize how circumstantial the images on the screen are, I can't make sense of what I see.

When I enter the second room, there is a mirror behind me. I think this is the second medium.

There is yet another obstacle ahead of me that separates this room from the next: a glass; the third medium. Or is it a mirror?

The glass is used as an instrument that periodically shows and conceals / reflects the section behind it. Depending on the position of the light, the glass may become reflective and show me the room I am in, or transparent and show the room behind. Since the screen sees the mirror in the far end of the last room, it may show the black void immediately across the mirror, or focus on a possible visitor inside. If it is a live projection screen, of course.

The instruments and forms of material used here change behavior under the conditioning of light, and turn into media that "bear a message". The message is the image of the knowledge of this place or what goes on in here. Swayed by the position and intensity of light, the sections in the space either reflect into themselves, or reveal what is behind them.

Then, as light is gradually suspended, I find myself left in darkness and brought face to face with another form of medium. I am surrounded by sound waves that splash against the walls and resonate across the room. Obviously modulated and synthesized by a device, these sound waves break into each other as they rebound off the walls in an acoustically incorrect environment.

These waves apparently have a life cycle. They are born, they realize themselves, and then are gradually, perhaps suddenly, absorbed. They shape the room entirely devoid of light until their time is up. When I am alone in the darkness with the sound, I can almost not see at all. I have to turn up my other senses or modes of sensing all the way. It is as if I'm honing, sharpening them.

In one sense, medium is used in the artistic context: as a tool, an instrument, an object that is necessary for the work of art to materialize.

As the visitor (myself or others) experiences this work, they inevitably become a component of the work for another visitor that they cannot see, and almost turn into a medium form themselves. Since the visitor will also see their own reflection in the glass that periodically goes into mirror mode, they will become a part of the work for themselves as well. In an atmospheric setting where subject and object, fiction and reality constantly change place and evolve into each other, positions are always relative.

I stay in here for as long as I can, and then I climb the stairs back into the chaos and leave this place behind.

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