KEZBAN ARCA BATIBEKİ: A ROOM WITHOUT A VIEW

KEZBAN ARCA BATIBEKI

Born in Istanbul. Batibeki graduated from The Fine Arts Faculty of İstanbul Marmara University’s Graphic Arts Department. She worked for the best art and women magazines in Turkey as an illustrator, designed book covers, children books and movie posters. She created an animation film for Swedish State TV and worked as a production designer and photographer on the films production.

1983 she relocated to Oxford and London in the UK to focus on her painting. She featured in twentyone solo exhibitions and participated in numerous Turkish and International group shows. She has been widely regarded as one of the most insightful artists concerned with popular culture involved in the contemporary art scene in Turkey. She works on paintings, photographs, installations and short films about women. She also writes about Art for the newspaper and magazines. She has twice been presented with the Grand Prize at the Esbank Awards. She lives and works in Istanbul.

PRESS RELEASE

ISTANBUL’74 Presents

Kezban Arca Batıbeki’s “A Room without a View” Exhibition November 10 – December 15, 2014 ISTANBUL’74 Karaköy 

Opening Reception: Monday, November 10, 2014, 18.30-20.00

Kezban Arca Batıbeki’s “A Room without a View” exhibition is presented by ISTANBUL’74 as of November 10 through December 20 at ISTANBUL’74 Karaköy.

Nostalgic elements figure heavily in Kezban Arca Batıbeki’s praxis, and cinematographic scenes, photonovels, records, magazines, statuettes, shiny objects, and glittering dresses all permeate the fabric of artistic production in terms of concepts such as subculture, cliché, kitsch, and pop.
 A Room without a View exhibition, featuring some of the most recent works of Batıbeki, can be viewed as an integrated work consisting of object-paintings in five panels, the reproduction of these panels by photo-engraving, and a short film which she has adapted from Aaahh Belinda, the 1986 Turkish fantastic comedy film directed by Atıf Yılmaz.
 Based on the artist’s personal memory, recollections, the cinema, in short, life itself, surrounded by loneliness, longings, dreams, and the melancholy of sorrow, and dealing with the internal and external siege against not only “woman” but this time the “individual”, A Room without a View is one of Batıbeki’s works that are loaded with sentimental relics.