Personal Mythologies by Ahmet Güneştekin

Description

Personal Mythologies manifests the ways Güneştekin reimagines personalistic elements in mythologies in an acutely intricate and bright context. The exhibition consists of diverse mediums from artist’s hybrid use of metal and mirrors in wall sculptures to optic and dimensional paintings.

A layer of personalistic being doubtless rests on all things because all things are nothing other than person turned inside out. Each thing can have infinitely diverse forms of expressing its personalistic nature while retaining its identity at the same time. Myth, for Güneştekin, is not only a personalistic history in this sense, but also a miraculous personalistic history expressed in graphic forms. The elements he borrows from mythologies represent the configuration of his dreams, his imaginations. By concentrating allegorical and vitally symbolic layers, these are the elements which construct artist’s own mythological geometry.

Light and darkness combines to generate visible forms: if there were only light or only darkness, no visible form would be possible, for the latter emerges only from the interaction of these opposites. In like manner, the one and the other, or being or non-being, merge in the concept of becoming, as will become clearly presently. The crucial thing about this kind of dialectical synthesis is that in it the opposites are not simply assimilated into the new concept without a trace, not they are discarded altogether, but are at once surmounted and preserved. Or rather, what is surmounted is their rigid isolation from each other and what is preserved is their actual meaning.

Güneştekin follows this line of reasoning, and adopts contradiction and opposition as prime mover to construct his understanding of myth. This way of thinking makes possible the synthesis of two concepts; those are myth and the modernity, and their synthesis generates a new concept they are both surmounted and preserved. In this concept, the universe of myth and modernity are not rigidly isolated from each other, that would render them meaningless, that is surmounted. And their actual meaning only arises when they are viewed in mutual contrast, thus preserved. This mode of thought also causes the artist to reimagine not only personalistic elements in myths but makes him explore the methods in his material executions. So that he is able to enclose energy into his art, which is equally effective in the multiplicity of material executions.

In Personal Mythologies, the artist’s works on display make the audience aware of the synthesis of the myths and the modernity of his culture evoking the nature of personalistic elements in mythologies. Myth is not an arbitrary invention or fiction; it is not a fantastic fabrication, but a logically or above all dialectically necessary category of consciousness. Myth is a personalistic form ultimately.