20 May – 27 June 2021

Raziye Kubat’s Night Flight, an exhibition that carries influences from her recent artistic process and the ever-changing state of her country and the World through the years of 2017 – 2021, will be on view at Depo. The exhibition presents paintings, video works, audiobooks, etchings, as well as elements designed to benefit the lives of stray animals and children.

In her text presenting the exhibition, Seda Yavuz writes: “The exhibition’s formal composition and its world of meanings are rather intertwined, but their mutual implication is in constant motion. In her artistic process, which casts the text as the transmitter, she emphasises the following thesis: ‘One is inclined to admire animals’ features they otherwise dislike or even are disgusted of in other things.’ We humans manage to alienate ourselves from anything we perceive to be ‘other’ or different without further thinking. Our sense of vision remains unchallenged by our other senses due to its predominant exercise and influence for thousands of years. Night flight may be carried out by a keen-eyed nocturnal owl or a blind eagle. Here, the main subject is the one who senses by intuition, rather than whose vision is the most developed. The experiences of animals of different kind come to life again in the exhibition thanks to the gesture of the artist, and we, the audience, have a chance to look once again at what we may have missed to see. Animal figures also evoke expression with their movements, as opposed to their individual existence. The artist gracefully liberates these animals, whose photographs were taken and isolated from their private environment to then become data in the virtual world.”

Raziye Kubat (b. 1968, Malatya, Turkey) graduated from the Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in 1989. Since then, she has been living and working as an independent artist in Istanbul, Turkey.

Image: r a z i y e k u b a t, i saw an elephant, it was in fact an army of elephants, mixed media on paper, 2018