If These Walls Could Hush: Selçuk Artut

Zilberman-Istanbul is honored to present Selçuk Artut’s solo exhibition “If These Walls Could Hush”. Artut’s fifth solo exhibition at Zilberman, "If These Walls Could Hush,” can be seen at Zilberman’s Main Gallery Space between September 18 and December 2, 2020.

Artut aims to present to art audience his new sound installation project, where experience, sound and memory are intersected with the contribution of technology and digital innovations. Artut will share the “kinetic sound sculpture,” in which light and sound technologies intersect with the expressive possibilities of contemporary art, in an atmosphere that has been transformed architecturally specifically for the exhibition.

Artut who is a Faculty Member at Sabancı University Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and Advisory Board Member at Gate 27 Contemporary Art Platform, explains his project in a conceptual text as follows:

‘’Silence is a coincidence. You happen to find yourself in it. There are so many sounds around you and you don’t hear any of them. For a moment you plunge into an emptiness as if breaking away from life. You hide behind that invisible curtain in a quiet manner. This might be a way of holding yourself together. Listening to sheer silence becomes a kind of involuntary response to keeping yourself out of all the chaos. You keep looking for the sound of silence, where it is hidden, even if there is no access to it. Our lives are surrounded by walls. Even though we try to bury and hide all our secret experiences under a tree, they sprout and come out into the sun. Yet walls do not want to hide anything. They have peculiar colors, smells, textures, as well as sounds, although we think we will never hear them. It might be that they are not struggling to be heard but actually walls do have a language. And the good thing is, they never lie. They do not try to hide from anyone what is happening, all the treachery and the wrath. Pale marks behind paintings removed from the wall, holes plastered over, migrated patch paints and the like always carry something from past to today, tomorrow, to us and what is not with us.

If you listen carefully, you may notice what those seemingly quiet walls are actually trying to tell you. Touching the keys on a piano that has remained silent for years and years instantly breaks its silence and expresses  generously all the sounds it possesses. It is often music that turns into sound, but what we hear is also a memory transformed into sound. This is exactly why sounds fail to lie. The sound speaks for itself, our task is to notice the effort. Those sounds keep playing inside you, trying not to bore you. Then a sound comes out, sometimes whispering to you. You don’t want to pay attention to what you hear. You can never tell anyone else. What you hear marks the moment of witnessing everything. You want to forget and you do.’’


Selçuk Artut’s (b. 1976) artistic explorations and productions focus on the theoretical and practical dimensions of the human-technology relationship. Artut’s works have been exhibited at Dystopie Sound Art Festival (Berlin, 2018), Moving Image NY (New York, 2015), Art13 London (London, 2013), ICA London (London, 2012), Art Hong Kong (Hong Kong, 2011), and 10. Istanbul Biennial (Istanbul, 2007) and took place in media such as Artsy, Creative Applications, CoDesign, Visual Complexity, and CNN GO. The artist completed his PhD in Media and Communication at the European Graduate School in Switzerland. He is currently running the Visual Arts and Visual Communication Design program at Sabancı University where he teaches Sound and Interaction. He has released many albums with the post-rock avant-garde band Replikas, of which he has been a member since 1998. In 2016, together with Alp Tuğan, he founded the audio and video performance group called RAW which produces works with live coding method.


For more information about the exhibition, please contact Evrim Altuğ: evrim@zilbermangallery.com