EXHIBITIONS / PAST / IT IS A JOY TO BE HIDDEN

INSTALLATION

TEXT

The title refers to a quote by D. Winnicott’s: “It is a joy to be hidden but disaster not to be found”. In the exhibition Bugay investigates the modes of the psyche and mainly deals with the concept of the private. The artist sets out to find representations of subjective privacy within rigid institutions that lack an identity. The exhibition, thus, aims to trigger a collective unconscious within a meeting with the viewer.

As Zeynep Sayın puts it in her article on the exhibition: “The work of Başak Bugay is unsettling. One feels that he/she is looking at things and spaces that one is not allowed. Feeling a need to protect children from these dollhouses, we are alienated from them: We realize that who we want to protect is ourselves, not the children. Unable to hold ourselves back, however, we remove one cover, look through a hole and infiltrate into a private space. What we are looking at is a dollhouse after all, right? Yet, it is not. Death is one’s private space.

These dolls have no relatives, no names, no faces – they are anonymous, so are their memories. Images have possessions, death means abandonment.

Başak Bugay strikes us with the reality of playing with model houses and dolls – with no glorification, no exaggeration or no over-emphasis. Joining a play mimics something that is not a play – it requires imago and persona.

Wearing the right mask or following the right trace at the right time reminds us something that we did not even realize we forgot. Rather than worshipping ancestors, this can reveal to us how ancestors were worshipped. It can help us revisit the histories of art (image/ culture/ politics/ law) based on simple baby dolls. Bugay’s work can offer pathways into the right traces of the history through baby dolls.

It reminds one of spaces where disease and death reign: beds on which no one sleeps anymore, crumpled sheets, a dirty toilet with poor lighting. A toilet is the single uninspected public space. One is not inspected only in graves and toilets.

The work of Başak Bugay is unsettling. One feels that he/she is looking at things and spaces that one is not allowed. Feeling a need to protect children from these doll houses, we are alienated from them: We realize that who we want to protect is ourselves, not the children. Unable to hold ourselves back, however, we remove one cover, look through a hole and infiltrate into a private space. What we are looking at is a doll house after all, right? Yet, it is not. Death is one’s private space.

Zeynep Sayın

WORKS

BOOK

Publisher Millî Reasürans T.A.Ş.

1st Edition, 1000 copies

ISBN 978-605-2391-03-7

Organization Millî Reasürans Sanat Galerisi

Text Zeynep Sayın

Translation Çağdaş Acar

Photography Burcu Aksoy, Mihriban Demircan

Design Didem Dayı

Color separation and Printing Mas Matbaacılık

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