ARTER – space for art presents AFTERIMAGE Mat Collishaw

ARTER – space for art presents AFTERIMAGE Mat Collishaw on 2 May–11 August 2013, the exhibition is curated by Başak Doğa Temür and brings together 18 works dating from the ’90s to the present. It also features a new video installation funded by the Vehbi Koç Foundation, which the artist has produced exclusively for this exhibition and will be premiered at ARTER.

Mat Collishaw has been exploring the darker side of human nature by using the power of images in his artistic production, which spans a period of over 20 years. In his photographs, oil paintings, sculptures and installations, he delicately brings together pain and beauty, loss and light, decay and innocence. Inspired by the potential for emotional manipulation inherent in the image, Collishaw’s work employs beautiful, inviting and seductive images in order to tackle concepts such as despair, disease and evil.

Afterimage presents a selection of Collishaw’s works that form the myriad intersections of media, material and conceptual themes: his photographs, sculptures and installations that use light, surface and projection in unconventional ways. The exhibition takes its title from a term used to describe a specific optical illusion, whereby an image continues to exist even after the stimulation. In this sense, Afterimage could be thought of as a key concept in understanding Collishaw’s visual approach and works.

Mat Collishaw often uses real images of disaster and suffering, or staged images related to these, producing attractive, fascinating and even hypnotic works that draw us in. Whether directly using documentary images as in the works Kristallnacht (2002), Barbarossa (2002/2013) and Suicide Suite (1993/2013), or a staged image based on a background event as in Burnt Almonds (2000) or Last Meal on Death Row (2010), Collishaw’s work often leaves us experiencing contradictory feelings in the face of universal issues.

Prize Crop, the video installation produced for the exhibition at ARTER, is a 3D animation where he sets in motion photojournalist Kevin Carter’s iconic Pulitzer Prize-winning 1993 photograph titled Famine in Sudan.

Collishaw also borrows various elements of nature in his work: butterflies, birds, savage dogs or flowers. The Venal Muse (2012) is a work that pays homage to Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal and features diseased or wounded flowers made of artificial resin, sprouting out of lead-coloured soil. On close inspection their fine petals have a flesh-like appearance, with anthropomorphic scars and sores pitting the skin. They are reflections on the depraved state of modern, media-saturated culture or spectres of genetic manipulation.

ARTER – space for art
Istiklal Caddesi, 211
Beyoglu, Istanbul, Turkey
Hours: Tuesday–Thursday 11–19h
Friday–Sunday 12–20h
Admission free
www.arter.org.tr