ZEYNEP ÇİLEK ÇİMEN'S “HIDED DOWRY” EXHIBITION AT MERKUR 

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Young artist Zeynep Çilek builds bridges between tradition and the future with her exhibition titled “Hidden Dowry”. It blends images that have an important place in the history of art with patterns and motifs unique to us, offering a colorful, different and deep visual world. He places Hurufi elements in his works using geometric lines.

 

''The dowry is reserved by its nature.

It is prepared with dreams, expectations, hopes;

It is carefully stored in chests and equivalents,

It reflects the taste of a person, a neighborhood, an era.

People, states, societies come and go, dowry remains.

 

Because dowry is a bond that attaches us to our identity,

It is a common heritage that reflects the collective unconscious.

It is a naive answer to the question of who we are.

 

Every material, every motif used while processing the dowry,

Every line, every pattern, every archetype

It is a mirror of an emotion, a thought, a sensitivity.

Those feelings turn into a memory over time

And it is enshrined in art.

 

I also collected dowry

Geography and space, history and time, mind and heart,

Despite the so-called chasm between confusion and naivete, waking and dreaming...” 

 

Man's relation to his origin is different from his relation to the root of a tree. Of course, this does not mean that a person is rootless.

For an artist, to lose memory or to be frozen in a moment of memory means to be lost. History is a reality that we can neither get stuck in nor remain ignorant of.

But talking about the uniqueness, beauty and richness of bygone days does not make the artist unique, rich and beautiful. Because for a tradition to survive, at least a part of the society must want to continue it.“

Zeynep Çilek Grass