Tuba (Korkmaz) Batu’s exhibition “ESSENCE-A Hope Inside Me” is opened in the Yildiz Kenter Art gallery of Bodrum Dibeklihan Culture and Art Village. The documentary titled the “Essence” screened together with the exhibition, was about Batu’s struggle to find herself as “a mother, an artist, a victim of violence against women”.
Assoc. Prof. SOLMAZ BUNULDAY / COMU Faculty of Arts Department of Art History
Carl G. Jung says that a feeling of integrity can be achieved by the conscious and the unconscious coming together and whatever the potential of self is, it can be realized completely only through this. And the things that ensure this integrity are the “transcendency symbols”. Only through these symbols you can achieve the unconscious consciousness. And these are the subsidiary tools to reach to the consciousness and may find their expressions through various forms: dreams, imaginations, artistic producings…

And birds and fishes, boats and roses are these “transcendency symbols” in Tuba’s works. Messenger birds that symbolize the release of an intuition, springing to life back again. These birds are waiting on branches to be reborn. These are nester swallows, the symbol of love, loyalty, hope and compassion. They make their nests from clay and mud, just like Tuba.
Rose is another symbol in Tuba’s works, which’s known as the queen of the flowers and symbolizes love, spiritual enlightenment, tranquility and both life and regeneration and death and agony. Rose represents freedom, wisdom and innocence on one hand and passion and desire on the other. For all these reasons, Aphrodite, Helios and Dionysius and Muses have chosen it as a symbol.
Our mind is like a machine working nonstop. This’s not changing while we’re on our own or together with other people. There are no limits in thinking, we can think of everything, but can we express them easily and in peace? Can we convey them if we want to talk about our traumas? It seems certain that there will always be something missing.
When I look at Tuba’s works I see the impacts of the traumas she has faced. Maybe these are the traumas that impaired her against life. But I also see the hope as an essence which prevent her to give up on life. Even she narrates the things she couldn’t express with words, desires to forget or thinks that she forgot, she makes a therapy in some way and completes the missing parts.
In a time like this where no one listens to no one and everybody is just waiting for their turns, these are the works which talks to inside. Just how it came to mind at that moment, whatever it is. Works where she can be on her own, talk directly point blank. After all, these are some works with word written inside them which we cannot see.
The real invisible is the transcendence one, the “essence”. Tuba’s “essence” is hope. No way we can live without hope.
Comments