Phantom Limbs: Selected
Zilberman is pleased to announce Selçuk Artut’s solo exhibition, Phantom Limbs, set to take place from January 11 to April 12, 2025, at Zilberman | Selected, located at Piyalepaşa. Phantom Limbs, harboring Artut’s most recent works, paves the way to an intertwined journey towards the understanding of perception; breaking the horizon of dimensions and exploring the fragile tension between absence and presence.
Phantom Limbs is named after a physiological, psychological, and neurological phenomenon that depicts the margins of consciousness of an amputated body. This concept underscores that the body is not merely a collection of physical parts but a lived, dynamic entity extending into the world through perception and action. The exhibition explores perception as an extension of the body, locating itself amidst the perceived medium, delving on to its centrality in shaping subjective experience.
Continuing Artut's Geomart-ut series—rooted in traditional geometric patterns— the exhibition harbors two new sculptures, titledGeomart-ut-sc series, crafted from geometric artifacts found in historical monumental structures. Geomart-ut-sc1 echoes its form in the print titled Planet, which presents the sculpture against a breathtaking vista, blurring the line between reality and illusion. The exhibition continues with a two-channel video, created with creative coding, entitled Presence in its Absence, fragmented from patterns in Karatay Madrasa. Complementing this installation are six prints, titled Manifold series, that explore the myriad of possibilities stemming from the work Presence in its Absence. Through this body of work, Artut challenges conventional visual perception, uncovering the ambivalence embedded in the perceived world.
Rooted deeply in dialectic creativity, Artut investigates the enduring relationship between technology, mathematics, and art, reinterpreting historical geometric patterns through a contemporary lens. With the work Presence in its Absence, developed from the intricate patterns of Karatay Madrasa in Konya, the artist reframes the geometrical patterns, long celebrated as emblems of harmony, order, and cultural continuity, into striking artifacts that embody both resilience and fragmentation. In this reimagining, Artut challenges the term “new media,” emphasizing the enduring interplay between innovation and tradition. Echoing historian Bernard Lewis’s infamous question, “What went wrong?” regarding cultural shifts in the Middle East, Artut explores how geometry, a historically universal language, creates illusions forming complex relationships between absence and presence.
The exhibition creates a visual playground for the spectator, challenging and redefining the boundaries of visual and cognitive perception by presenting akin geometric patterns across various mediums. These geometric fragments engage the viewer in a dialogue where perception bridges the gap between what is seen and what is intuited. With the Geomart-ut-sc series, scattered through the gallery in various forms and sizes, Artut plays with the infinite possibilities of perception, forming potentialities of the object, embodying the bodily standpoint of the viewer, allowing them to explore the manifold realities of the same object. The viewer's interaction with geometric objects is not just a visual experience but a participatory one, where each action contributes to the ongoing reorganization of the image.
The duality of reality is examined not only through the sculptures but also through print entitled Planet, generated with a photo realistic approach, depicting a stunning sunset vista. This piece draws inspiration from a stunning scene in Planet of the Apes (1968) in which the Statue of Liberty is submerged in sand, representing a poignant symbol of a broken link to what was once a planet earth. Planet perplexes the viewer, prompting reflection on its essence as it lingers between prosperity and collapse; present yet intangible, blurring the boundaries between the real and the imagined.
Phantom Limbs navigates the viewer through a mindbending journey; laying bare the layered complexities of perception. Geometric patterns, often seen as archetypes of stability, unity, and transcendence, are recast as phantom remnants of a cultural and intellectual past. The exhibition unburdens the deconstructed state of objects, becoming artifacts of memory —echoes of their original wholeness.
