Esra Carus – Yas, Yasa, Yasak

Taking place at Depo between 6 March – 18 May 2024, Yas, Yasa, Yasak [Grief, Law, Prohibition] brings together Esra Carus‘ works spanning over 30 years. The artist’s memory navigates between image, sound, body, and space accompanied by representations, sticking to things that the socio-political order builds/tears apart and scatters. As an interpretation of Carus’s method of thinking and production, the exhibition can be approached as a collage of time in its entirety.

Esra Carus is an artist vocal about the damage caused by power and evil. Her ever-increasing number of works follow our complicity as we wander in these badly damaged times and geographies, and deal with the reality of the world of objects and events between paper and porcelain. Carus invites whatever there is to transparency from the perspectives of the artist and its audience onto her own stage. The stage she sets in the exhibition deciphers the record of grief that grows between bans and arbitrary laws with sounds, images, colors and objects.

Sounds of fragmentation and disintegration are on display at the Yas, Yasa, Yasak: It takes us on a journey exploring the connections between the destruction caused by these three words and history, present, politics, racism, women’s rights, workplace homicide, and eventually, justice/injustice. Esra Carus looks at the grief of Turkey and beyond with concepts, images and places like those of Shakespearian characters, the Taksim Square, prison, death, shortcomings, dinner table, and cage; ventures further out into the world on a route determined by the scales of justice balancing the past and the present.

This exhibition is not only a scene for the landscape of injustice but also a narrative that follows the artist’s oeuvre. Esra Carus both records and produces the accounts of the times she has witnessed, and reinterprets them in times when we have thoroughly learned that nothing has changed.

In between the breaks and cuts, Yas, Yasa, Yasak resonates deeply.