Canan Dağdelen

After an interval of five long years Galeri Nev is hosting Canan Dağdelen anew. And in her show in Nev, Dağdelen is once again turning upside down concepts that form the essence of her inspiration such as time, space, architecture, memory, identity, and in particular the gravity. Two significant installations, “TABANI dot” and “Reconstructive Memory”, from which the show takes its name, are being exhibited for the first time in Ankara. Constructed with modular spheres she names as “dots”, both works are floating in space and thus challenging all the traditional elements in architecture. These two “pending pieces” consisting of metal and porcelain on thin ropes, paves the way for both the confrontation and the harmony of weight and lightness, of fullness and emptiness and of the interior and the exterior. Another work included within the exhibition “Reconstructive Memory” entitled “SELF constructed PORTRAIT”, constitutes a significant example to Dağdelen’s autobiographic works. The artist breaks down a childhood photograph into its “pixels” and reconstructs it with ceramic nails she has dug into clay. Consequently, as in her other works, the form is initially reduced to its most minute units to be then reconstructed anew, and by doing so redefines the relation between fragments and entirety. “Reconstructive Memory” is at the same time hosting photographs taken by the artist and transferred onto porcelain through silkscreen. On the one hand, these porcelain plaques produce different stories, the details of which we observe through the eyes of Dağdelen. While on the other, when viewed as large “dots”, they turn into the parts of a whole, the particles of a greater picture, the “big picture”.
Born in 1960 in İstanbul, Canan Dağdelen graduated in 1986 from the Vienna University of Economics; in 1991 obtained her master’s degree from the Vienna University of Applied Arts. As of 2003, she is a lecturer at the same university. The works of Dağdelen who lives in Vienna, have recently been included in the Collection of the İstanbul Modern Arts Museum, shown at the avantgarde gallery, Operation Room at the American Hospital, Apel Gallery, Akbank Sanat in Istanbul, Lentos Kunstmuseum in Linz, the First International Biennial in Mardin, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa. Canan Dağdelen is also represented at one of Vienna’s prominent museums, the Austrian Museum of Contemporary Arts (MAK), within the on-going exhibition entitled "Signs Taken in Wonder".