CEMAL DEMİR'S "DARK STORY" EXHIBITION AT MERKUR
Cemal Demir's exhibition Dark Story opens on Thursday, May 4 at MERKUR.
Ahmet Ergenç, in his article titled “The Violence of Situations and Objects” he wrote about the exhibition, says the following about Cemal Demir's works:
“Hitchcock has a famous definition of 'thriller'. If, he says, in the movie you detonate a bomb under a table, it will be a horror movie, but if you show the bomb under the table and you don't detonate it, it will be a thriller. It is this state of 'tense waiting' or 'being on the threshold' that determines the psychological and physical color of Hitchcock's films. You may feel the same thing, for example, with a hand holding an egg. That egg will soon break or that bomb under the table will explode soon. In fact, in that moment of tense waiting, breaking or bursting is a kind of salvation. The sudden feeling of the horror film only provokes a reflex, it has a volatile effect, while the thriller demands concentration, both physical and mental: the ghost of 'what will happen next' haunts you constantly, and the moment of happening is constantly delayed. This leads to that 'tense feeling' or 'violent expectation'.
A similar element of tension dominates Cemal Demir's exhibition titled “Dark Story”.
The actions fixed in the pictures have a 'dangerous' or 'dark' connotation, in line with the title of the exhibition. But rather than such an 'obvious' darkness or danger, these paintings show a danger hidden in the lower veins or deep psychological layers. And if you add these pictures end to end, you can finally reveal the outline of a thriller.
The tense aesthetics of the paintings are also nourished not by the ready-made material presented by an extraordinary moment, but by an extraordinary, strange or aberration that vibrates in ordinary moments.
This exhibition, called Dark Story, makes one feel that everyday life is not so 'innocent' and that ordinary situations can contain extraordinary possibilities or secrets. Dark meanings may be hidden in the 'situations' that people are in and the objects they use. It is precisely in these situations and objects that what Freud called the 'unrest of civilization' may be revealed. “
