Dirimart Nişantaşı is pleased to announce .tr, Hayal Pozantı’s first solo exhibition in Turkey. The exhibition consists of paintings inspired by the history and the statistics of information technologies in Turkey.
In her work, Pozantı reveals her own cipher system, titled Instant Paradise, whereby numbers and letters from the English language are replaced by her own iconic alphabet. The alphabet emerged in relation to data encoding, which has become more prominent through the artist’s generation. Through this, she converts phrases into abstract visual compositions. Now that the mass media has considerably shortened the time required to become familiar with an image, Pozantı is looking for ways to extend this timeframe, in others words to reverse it to the old “normal.” This language that reproduces itself in countless combinations, invites the audience to pursue the patterns, which are unknown at first sight, yet evoke familiarity in time as they are repeated.
Hayal Pozantı’s paintings, which are in dialogue with digital application icons, animations, and graphic designs, offer a wide range of colors. The exhibition .tr where the artist sheds light on the various milestones of the history of the information technologies in Turkey invites the audience to contemplate the colorful compositions, which are encrypted and waiting to be deciphered. In this new series of paintings created with Instant Paradise, a selection of significant dates such as the year IBM launched its business in Turkey, or the year of the first Internet connection as well as some statistical information such as the percentage of the households with Internet access are hidden.
Hayal Pozantı (b. 1983, Istanbul, Turkey) has a BA from Sabancı University and a MFA from Yale University. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Broad Art Museum in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and the JP Morgan Private Bank Collection. In 2015, Pozantı had her first solo museum exhibition titled Deep Learning at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut. Her work was also recently shown at The World Trade Center as part of Public Art Fund's 40th anniversary show as well as in group exhibitions at Western Michigan University (Michigan, 2017); The Kitchen (New York, NY, 2016); MCA Santa Barbara (CA, 2015); Cornell Fine Arts Museum (FL, 2015); Sabancı Museum (Istanbul, 2015) and Prospect 3 at the New Orleans Biennial (2014). Pozantı lives and works in New York City.