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.