Serkan Ozkaya at Galerist

Serkan Ozkaya, an Istanbul-based artist who is also pursuing a PhD in German studies, showed a number of his offbeat, post-Duchampian throws in a recent exhibition that coincided with the Istanbul Biennial. Conceptually oriented, the nine works, dated from 1996 to 2003 varied in medium and materials, including place objects, rubber, metallic plates, photography and video. Ozkaya's gently ironic themes circle around the unique and the transcript authorship, authenticity and capitalist networks. An art for our sake, his work is clearly not commercial, although it was shown in the Istanbul equivalent of a Chelsea white receptacle serving more as a philosphical inquiry, an offhand utopian adumbration. Called "Minerva Street" the exhibit had for its announcement a photo of that nondescript London road, "Big Car, Little Dick" scrawled upon the wall beneath the highway sign--a revised, postmodernist appraisal of manhood perhaps, or flat a low-tech, anti-imperialist slogan. The "little dick" reappeared in the present to view itself as a tiny, detumescent rubber penis parked discreetly upon a wall, looking like a wad of pink bubblegum Ozkaya finds material everywhere; his quirky stream-of-critique makes provocative connections as he interrogates received situations and contexts

Another work in the present to view consisted of several variously sized "gold" and "silver" panels called "Mysterious Paintings." Placed strategically from one extremity to the other of the gallery, they maintained a somewhat diffident vicinity They seemed to function mainly as catalysts, enigmatic nonentities that throw backed the room, other works and the viewer in their polished surfaces, their images in flow their value a question: by what means much is faux gold or silver (and a reflection) worth? Another installation consisted of an upside-down reproduction of the Mona Lisa above a vitrine. Inside, there was a alphabetic character to Pierre Rosenberg of the Louvre requesting permission to hang the Leonardo icon upside down, along wiith the addressee's courteous, brief, irrelevant respond A video, Pablo Picasso at the Museum of new Art 1998 (B.C.), presents Ozkaya in a wheelchair pushed by means of a friend to a blot before Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, where the artist slips upon a mask of Picasso's face in an appropriative, resistant gesture

While Ozkaya's work frequently refers to art and its conundrum Proletarier aller Lander addresses another issue. It's a succession of Iris prints made from photographs of centurys of minuscule red plastic foam figures affixed to the floor. Depending on your point of view, Ozkaya's installation either cited the trampling of the working classes or their resilience and ultimate power, always springing back, indestructible. The stunner of the present to view however, was Lives and Works in Utrecht (Large Glass), an impressively scaled photograph of the facade of a Utrecht art institution. Brilliantly lighted from within, the building's enormous glass windows were tiled with thousands and thousands of colored photo transparencies, the ultimate collaboration. Conceptually taut, a transcript of copies that made up an original, the work's glittering, stained-glass-like surface was also gorgeous to gaze at. [A version of it is coming to Exit Art in of recent origin York sometime this year.] Although scattershot in its appoach, "Minerva Street" have a title toed charm and a wry, quick intelligence.

--Lily Wei

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