Let’s learn more about the skilled artist Ekin Su Koç’s journey in art while examining her latest solo show ‘Altbau,’ referring to notions like identity, gender and the relation between human and nature in the Anthropocene epoch with an online visit.
I first encountered Berlin-based Turkish artist Ekin Su Koç’s works at Step Istanbul, an art event that presented works of hundreds of different contemporary artists last November. The artist’s eye-catching collage works, created with daily magazines, lace and various other materials immediately drew me in. While deriving inspiration from nature and human psychology, these collages transformed into a body with flowers or animals. They seemed to be representing life itself and narrating stories to me at the same time.
Anna Laudel’s second gallery in Germany’s Düsseldorf recently presented Koç’s solo exhibition titled “Altbau” to art enthusiasts. When I learned that the exhibition can be viewed online, I seized the opportunity to enjoy the beauty and aesthetic of the artist’s pieces once again.
On the first floor of the gallery, plaster wall sculptures combining Berlin’s old apartment motifs that offer visual richness and handmade fabrics of nomads from Turkey’s Aegean region welcome visitors. Scrutinizing the concepts of identity and belonging via new materials in these works, Koç says that these sculptures are designed as a part of the old walls of the gallery space, which turns them into site-specific pieces.
Anna Laudel’s Germany branch, which was launched in 2019, is housed in a renewed building bearing old, architectural details. The word, Altbau, which gives the exhibition its name, means “old apartment” in German and is used to describe, especially venerable structures with stucco ornaments. In this sense, the gallery building and the exhibition’s name and works constitute triple parallelism with references to art history.
