Ceramic artist Elif Aydoğdu Ağatekin touched again upon the social problems in her own language in her exhibition titled “Birds Land on your Trouble”. The latest works of Ağatekin emphasize that both human and ceramic can be shaped by being broken.
Fatma Batukan Belge
Ceramic artist Elif Aydoğdu Ağatekin’s exhibition, “The Birds Land on your Trouble”, which she opened at the Nurol Art Gallery in Ankara in recent months, aroused curiosity. Are birds really land in to trouble, was there such a phrase? Actually no, there is not. It came up by Ağatekin, a good Hasan Ali Toptaş reader, emulating the book “Birds go to Mourn” in terms of language... The artist says that the exhibition, which includes her recent works, is a kind of acceptance exhibition:“The end of an internal struggle that has been going on for years… The situation where being the winner or loser is not cared about… Pretending not to have heard… A ceasefire between conscience and mind… The state of watching the picture of the lost future on the roads repeatedly over the years…”.
Actually, Elif Aydoğdu Ağatekin did not stop fighting; she does not rebel, but criticizes in her own language. Of course, accepting the problem and making social criticism is also part of the tackle. She just does it more quietly. These works of art are moments of respite in this struggle where she “Signed a Ceasefire” in her own words. She works at Bilecik Şeyh Edebali University Faculty of Fine Arts and Design, Ceramic and Glass Department. Every day she goes to Bilecik from Eskişehir where her house and family are located. Wearied by traveling, she says: “While passing through cars, trucks, lanes, snowfalls, endless constructions, road works, graying nature,
factories and excavations every day, I’m a tired driver, who is exhausted from going away and coming back because I can’t hear my own voice from other people’s noise.”
Gray silhouettes of cement factories on the road fall on her works of art.But there are more birds than any of them in this exhibition, where her latest works take place.She piles up small piecesproduced from different mud, such as branches and leaves like birds collect from here and there to build their nests. It seems that Ağatekin, who completed her Proficiency in Art with her thesis on “The Use of Waste Ceramics as an Alternative Tool of Expression in Ceramic Art” and also used waste ceramic materials in her previous works, her relationship with such materials has matured. She no longer uses waste only; with the belief that human beings and ceramics will be shaped by being broken, deliberately breaks the solid use ceramics and uses it as a linguistic element in her expression. Since there are also 150-year-old antique porcelains among those she broke, she spends a serious budget on this.
What is her purpose? “My goal is to get rid of those in my mind, to get rid of them by trying to shape the burdens of shame that hurt consciences every day. That is why I deliberately break the ceramics. I cut through them, I make piles of the pieces, first I dismantle them all, then I gather that mess, I am looking for the shape they want to be tens of times by adding one piece by piece, one piece at a time.”
