İnci Eviner Retrospective: Who's Inside You?

This retrospective of İnci Eviner, put together by Istanbul Modern, showcased the artist’s creative process from the 1980s to the present. It allowed us to see the development and transformation of her rich search for expression, which extends from drawing, painting, and video to installation, photography, and sculpture. The presentation of Eviner’s artistic output was not strictly chronological, but rather interweaved past and present, and even incorporated the exhibition space itself.

Drawing is central to Eviner’s works; she defines the point of departure of her practice as expressions made through lines on paper. She builds and constantly enriches her artistic approach, strolling through a boundless visual language ranging from art historical allegories, iconographies, illustrations, and mythologies to contemporary ideograms and pictograms. Weaving together the violence at the heart of the beautiful, the potential of the repressed, and the unmatched creativity of the unconscious, her works appear simultaneously contemporary and timeless.

A pioneering artist who has been influential in the transformation of Turkish contemporary art, Eviner has developed a unique mode of expression regarding the different states of womanhood, gender, and the politics of identity in their collective, political, and sociocultural aspects. Investigating the historical, discursive, and unconscious processes that influence our views of female identity starting in childhood, the artist defines womanhood as a field of limitless possibility that does not fit any single image or concept.

Curator: Levent Çalıkoğlu

Assistant Curator: Senem R. Kantarcı