For artists & artists we started to discover new stories with curiosity and excitement; huo rf, erkut terliksiz, merve denizci and its art fans of elekkerem karadikara, elekkerem karad, who preserves the link that they made with art, with its nature of thinking and strong productions, maintaining their natural state and instinctions of elekkerem k.

Prepared by: Gözde Ulusoy

Photos: Burak Teoman

In her collection, which Melek Gencer displays in her home, some of them are Olgu Ülkenciler, Ayça Telgeren, Nihal Martlı, Huo Rf, Jennifer İpekel, Burak Şentürk, Volkan Aslan, Vahap Avşar, Güneş Terkol, Ali Cabbar, Burcu Yağcıoğlu, Sevim Sancaktar, Ali Elmacı, Murat Durusoy , Merve Denizci, Gülsün Karamustafa, Erdoğan Zümrütoğlu, Yasemin Özcan, Nilbar Güreş, Murat Germen, Peter Hristoff, Nancy Atakan, Serkan Yüksel, Güçlü Öztekin, Serra Tansel, Neslihan Başer, Elif Varol Ergen, Ece Ağırtmış, Hebru Brantley, Elmgreen & Dragset , Pat Andrea, Maude Maris, En Iwamura, Hugo Orlandini, Schilte & Portielije.

ANGEL GENCER & HUO RF

In the house of Melek Gencer, Director of SPOT Projects, who keeps art at the center of her life and continues by adding new steps to her art career that she has been pursuing since 2012, in Cihangir’s house, we met with Huo Rf, who has become the narrator of the stories she cannot ignore, and examines the powerful influence of society on building our identity.

ANGEL GENCER

As someone who not only follows contemporary art, but has been in this sector professionally for years, how does your art purchase take shape?

I have been in the art scene professionally since 2012, but my interest in art and making it a part of my life started in my childhood. There has been a “gathering” situation in my family home for as long as I can remember. While these were antiques at first, they later evolved into modern and contemporary works of art. With the interest of my family, my perception of art began to form at a young age.

I always think buying art is an instinctive thing; I tend towards the jobs that I feel attracted to and that I enjoy. I love my job very much and as I become involved in this business, as I get to know, read and wonder, my boundaries expand. The feelings I feel when taking a job can change over time and turn into another feeling as I live with it at home, and I enjoy thinking about it and internalizing it. I guess that’s what turns my art purchase into a passion; It is like therapy to live with works of art that accompany you in the process of knowing and listening to yourself, perhaps emerging from completely different stories, but with which you feel close, find common ground, and make you think.

Nobody’s taste and enjoyment remain constant, we are always in a transformation. As long as I continue to know myself and this field, I try to take the works that attract me instinctively, within the limits of my budget.

Almost all of your living space has gained an identity with art, and you have filled every area of your life with art, with both Spot Projects, border_less and your collector identity. Can you tell us a little about your house, yourself and what you do?

The apartment I live in in Cihangir is very precious to me spiritually. I have been living in the flat where my grandparents and their three children lived as a family in the 1970s, since 2014. I have made changes in the house according to my own taste and use, and I have been sitting with great pleasure since the first day. All of the works that I started to collect before I moved and continue to buy over the years have found their place at home. I like to relocate things over time, so I make room for new purchases. I have been the director of Spot Projects since 2017. In this membership platform, which was established in 2011, we create a privileged and up-to-date art calendar for our members, and organize exhibition tours, art talks, artist workshop visits, and visits to collector places. There is both the education part of the work and a Spot Support Fund that we created with the income we provide, thanks to this fund, we support various art projects and artist productions throughout the year. We also have a website called border_less, which we established in 2018 with my partner and close friend, artist Huo Rf, to publish art articles. Border_less, which we set out with the idea of supporting art publishing, which we both care about, is the artists and their initiatives, who have a publication and work on text, which we realized under the name border_less Artbook Days in April; He directed an event that brought together museums, galleries, institutions and institutes. We are currently working on the second edition of this event, which will take place on April 17-19, 2020. We aim to turn Border_less Artbook Days into an international event, to make up for the shortcomings in artist books and art publishing every year, and to develop by reaching more people. We also participate in international art book fairs. We were in Turin for our first international fair, Flat Art Book Fair, in October. There are many artists around us who produce books and work on text, one of them is my partner Huo Rf. While there is such a production nearby, taking these works and bringing them together with the audience abroad creates an alternative and beautiful dialogue space.

What impresses you in Huo Rf’s work? In addition to your relationship with the artist and the art lover, your close friend and the border_less past that you have established together.

Did having a partner with you move you to a different point in terms of catching a common language?

Our friendship with Huo Rf started when we worked together at Rampa Gallery. I saw his works for the first time in the exhibition “Possible”, which he opened in Karl Gallery in 2015, before I met him. I remember being very impressed and curious. After I met him, I got a job from this series. I love that Huo Rf uses different materials and explores a new area in each of his series, it seems very up-to-date and sincere that the artist is also in search of the same change and quest at a time when we are in a very rapid consumption and change. When you look at Huo Rf’s different series side by side, there is no repetitive material other than copper, which it frequently uses, and this is a feature that makes its new productions curious. At the same time, the fact that we are always in a dialogue before and during their production adds a different depth and creates a bond between me and the works.

Which artists have works in your home?

Olgu Ülkenciler, Ayça Telgeren, Nihal Martlı, Huo Rf, Jennifer İpekel, Burak Şentürk, Volkan Aslan, Vahap Avşar, Güneş Terkol, Ali Cabbar, Burcu Yağcıoğlu, Sevim Sancaktar, Ali Elmacı, Murat Durusoy, Merve Denizci, Gülsün Karamustafa, Erdoğan Zümrütoğlu , Yasemin Özcan, Nilbar Güreş, Murat Germen, Peter Hristoff, Nancy Atakan, Serkan Yüksel, Güçlü Öztekin, Serra Tansel, Neslihan Başer, Elif Varol Ergen, Ece Ağırtmış, Hebru Brantley, Elmgreen & Dragset, Pat Andrea, Maude Maris, En Iwamura You can see the works of Hugo Orlandini, Schilte & Portielije at my home.

Huo RF

In your work you focus on different definitions of the self and how the person and society characterize identity. Can you tell us about your production, focus and working process?

Writing a statement is very important in terms of defining yourself. It makes you feel safer to be able to share and talk about what you think about. But it’s also very limiting. Even though the physical borders that were set are still there, they are very transitory, the visible borders are almost non-existent, stories that can cross borders are constantly being born. On the other hand, I try to look at stories that seem personal but not personal, never forgetting that boundaries are determined by individuals. I think about how society processes our characters, the determining aspects of this on my work are the places and the portraits. Over time, I started to feel that I had turned into a storyteller, trying to process the events/moments that I could not ignore, which I could not ignore, that I wanted to remember and remind, that I wanted to record/document.

I studied art in high school and university, I settled in Istanbul in July 2010. I started writing and doing interviews in 2011. Since 2011, I have written in many magazines such as Vogue Turkey, Time Out Istanbul, Milliyet Sanat, Sanat Dünyamiz, Art Unlimited, Tohu Magazine, and I still have a relationship with most of them. I started doing almost non-verbal interviews for my column called “Huo is Asking” at Art Unlimited. The book we published for the second group exhibition of Signs of Time “Outside, the Dream” in 2014, and the catalog that I created for my exhibition titled “The Possible” in 2015, opened up a completely different book channel for me. The articles that emerged, my collaborations, the designers, curators and interviews I worked with changed the format of the ‘books on exhibition’ in my mind. My book, which I published for my exhibition titled ‘Stories in Reverse’, which I held in 2017, evolved to a completely different point with 128 pages. Long story short, writing and new collaborations brought about by empathy started to open up new ideas and new areas for me to produce books. At the same time, a nice collection of books started to form in the process, and Melek’s in the same way as I follow. As I started to think about my book productions, the door to sharing my books in the right areas opened. I attended the Paris Ass Book Fair held at the Palais de Tokyo last April. It was mind-opening for my own productions. My book productions have also come together with the specific audiences of this field. All these experiences and border_less, the online text platform we established in 2018, laid the foundations of border_less Artbook Days. In other words, writing and border_less / border_less Artbook Days both turned into my own practice, these activities and collaborations in my own practice, and fed each other.

How does it make you feel to see your work taking place in an art lover’s home, especially when it’s your close friend and partner?

Let’s say that our paths with Melek crossed thanks to the practice and life problems of both of us. We were both working at Rampa Gallery. The language we speak, the artists we follow and the works we are interested in brought together other partnerships, such as border_less. I am very lucky in terms of my friends around me. I first share my every idea, production, project and book with my close friends. The comments of those whose professionalism is in other sectors are more direct, which contributes to my process.

Melek, on the other hand, is my close friend, collector, and art professional, so she has full control over my entire process and is by my side. He knows very well how I produce with pains and what I want to produce. His own knowledge and experience inevitably contributes to my process at many different points. It is not possible to have such a bond/relationship between every collector and artist. The feeling of seeing my own work in someone else’s field is very strange. While art can be tangible, its spirit is very abstract. I visit Melek a lot. Every time I come together with my own affairs, I face myself. It’s like going back to my own history all the time for me. I don’t forget and it feels good.

Kerem Kanık, who has the works of Erkut Terliksiz both in the living area in Sarıyer and in the mountain house in Sapanca, mentions that he even carries out the layout of the house based on his works.

KEREM KANIK & ERKUT SLIPPERS

With Kerem Kanık, the founding partner of Titrifikir, who defines his ties with art as the striking effect it creates on himself and then as a part of a whole relationship in which he includes the artist in his life, in his new home in Sarıyer; We met with Erkut Terliksiz, who destroys the perception of perfection with his amorphous figures and makes us face the things we avoid while creating the impression that the doors of a lovely world are opening at first glance.

KEREM KANIK

How did your relationship with art begin? How did your story evolve towards becoming an art lover who follows and supports contemporary art, as well as your collection, which you say has been shaped by your instincts from the very beginning?

In fact, it was a completely instinctive and progressive process. It all started when I was walking in Alaçatı on a summer evening, seeing a work exhibited in a gallery of approximately 10 m² and being impressed. A feeling seized me and I entered the gallery. I remember looking at a single piece for a very long time. The exhibition was Mahmut Karatoprak’s personal exhibition, and while I didn’t know it was the artist at that time, he had a long conversation with me about the work and at the end of this conversation, I learned that he was the artist. That same night, I went back to the gallery and went to see that piece. I didn’t intend to buy it, I just wanted to see the work again. In fact, the artist himself told me not to buy that piece of work, that our paths would cross again one day and that I should buy a piece of work that I was really sure of.

Three years passed and I saw the news of Mahmut Karatoprak’s exhibition in a magazine by chance and went to the exhibition immediately. He remembered me as soon as he saw me and that day I bought a work that I liked from the exhibition. This was the first job I bought and hung on my wall. This is how my experience of meeting and chatting with the artist started.

Can we consider your progress by establishing a bond with the artist as well as the work as a part of a whole?

I’m definitely moving forward with the artists I associate with. I include not only the work, but also that person in my life. This is always the case in my daily life, maybe it is related to the fact that I am a storyteller and I believe in it. I like to collect a collection of people I know and have a conversation with. But of course, the work has to catch me first. At this point, I feel very separate from the common trend. I’m not really interested in streams, subreadings. I’m not irrelevant, one must have a wealth of knowledge, an idea about art history, but I don’t care about basing everything or making sense of it.

I look at it a bit like love, like being hit. If you ask what they have in common or why you took these jobs, I cannot give an answer conceptually. I know that I cannot escape the moment I feel the work grab me by the throat with a strong emotion; Originality comes into play here. When you find something about yourself, you are influenced by that piece, and it is the same in music. Why do you like a song? For catching something of your own. I believe in the value of the feeling that overflows through the work and reaches me.

You have an Erkut Terliksiz collection that is not limited to the house you live in and you follow its production very closely. How did you meet Erkut Terliksiz’s work and what influenced you?

There are many works of Erkut Terliksiz that I have bought or not. Each one of them has a powerful explosion in me, that’s what makes it special. If I go back to my story of meeting Erkut, I already knew his name through our mutual friends, he was someone I was in the same circle but could not meet. Again, one day, I saw a work from the “Monster Trainer” series in the magazine and I was very impressed not knowing that the work belongs to Erkut. The work is still in front of my eyes, I will never forget it. As with Mahmut Karatoprak’s work, this work also impressed me a lot. I looked, I dived, I couldn’t help myself. If I couldn’t help myself, then I wanted to buy the piece, but I was completely unaware of the process, I didn’t know whether it was a contemporary work or just a work of the artist in the magazine. When I looked at who the work belonged to, I saw Erkut’s name. It was part of the ongoing exhibition in Maslak 42, so I adjusted my schedule and went to see the work, not the exhibition. And I learned the bitter truth that the business was sold. I am really sorry, but even if no one knows, that work actually belongs to me… I can say that this piece set the fire.

In addition to Erkut Terliksiz, there are works by Sedat Girgin, Ekin Su Koç and Serkan Yüksel at my home, which I bought from Paris and Italy.

ERKUT SLIPPERS

In fact, you are staging a surreal world that seems to present a colorful and fairy-tale world, but when examined, we put aside the expectations of perfection and face what we avoid. The use of different materials and textures is one of the most important details of your production. Can you tell us a little about the content of your work?

I have been working on found materials for about 10 years. The paintings I make are shaped by the location of the workshop and the garbage around it. My love for painting on different surfaces, even impossible surfaces, continues. I have been discovering new workshops and new working disciplines for the last 1 year. I started working on canvas again. Concepts such as the corrupt psychology of human beings, the material and moral destruction it has caused and its consequences, the perspective of countless human experiences, the fundamental inventiveness, inner creativity and the capacity for ongoing destruction have been the focus of my work.

How does it make you feel to see your work take place in an art lover’s home when you are also a friend?

I have never been in favor of explaining exactly what my work means to me, at this point I always like to see what the person who has a relationship with that job thinks and feels. I believe we should leave room for that. And seeing someone be a part of your life always impresses me.