Ahmet Güneştekin: Silence

The Kurdish-Turkish artist Ahmet Güneştekin returns to Italy after a major solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome. About The newexhibition, titledSessizlik / Silenzio / Silence, curated by Sergio Risaliti, coincides withthe launch of the cultural activities of the Güneştekin Foundation, housed in PalazzoGradenigo.The palazzo, located in Venice's Castello district, was purchased by the artistand underwent major restoration work over the past two years. Sessizlik / Silenzio / Silenceis a complex display of artworks including paintings andsculptures, a sort of staging spread across the ground floor, the first floor and theexterior of the building There are 11 bronze sculptures and an equal number of oil paintings displayed on the walls of the building's two floors. The sculptures, of varying sizes and dimensions, reaching over three meters in height, were created in the artist's workshops and ateliers in Istanbul and are on display for the first time. Conceived as site-specific works, they depict a diverse community of people captured in various poses. The figure of a young woman welcomes us at the entrance to the building, in an arrangement reminis cent of ancient façade decorations, such as those that adorned, in ancient times, churches and noble palaces, royal residences and theatres with their own symbols and iconography. Many of the bronze works depict labourers in their work clothes, holding tools. Their features are inspired by the very workers involved in the building’s restoration. They are portrayed at rest, tired, almost absent-minded, exhausted. In other cases they stand, as if lost in thought, amidst those very walls they have helped restore to their former splendour, and they blend in with the people wandering through the halls of Palazzo Gradenigo. Some of them hold objects that are dear to the artist, such as animals, skulls, and symbolic elements belonging to Güneştekin's figurative repertoire, both in sculpture and in paintings. The presence of these objects opens a temporal parenthesis, marks a suspension of time, and connects past and future, as if another temporality were inserted between the actions that were already accomplished and those yet to be accomplished. Beyond the reality to which these figures allude, archaeological time creeps in, the time of collective memory, traditions, and artistic civilisations. Read more Toggle Sculpture Painting