Burçak Bingöl

Cruise, 2014, Ceramic, 200 x 190 x 30 cm

This large-scale ceramic work, which I produced by taking a direct mould from an asphalt-laying truck in Istanbul, is the latest in a series of objects alienated from themselves, developed within the framework of the theme of alienation that I have long explored. Both the ceramic material and the form of the truck are detached from their familiar associations and brought together to propose a new possibility. Evolving from the individual to the social, this subject draws upon my experience of living between Ankara, the capital of the Republic, and Istanbul, the former capital of the empire. It examines the idea of socio-psychological transformation in a city caught between the myth of the East and the utopia of the West. Traditional tile motifs, drawn from the material’s own history, are combined with the form of a truck in a way that contrasts sharply with its industrial bulk and heaviness. As the central work in the exhibition *Araba Sevdası* (2014), *Seyir* is articulated as a formal experiment that adds a sense of incongruity to the misunderstandings in Recaizade Mahmut Ekrem’s novel of the same name. In a society where memory is fragmented, the work attempts to bring the familiar and the unfamiliar into relation with one another. *Seyir* moves slowly towards an uncertain future. As it proceeds along its own path under the weight of what has accumulated layer upon layer across its surface, it also becomes the subject of a spectacle in the classical sense.