Hakan Onur, 1965

Hakan Onur holds a master’s degree in art from Marmara University Faculty of Fine Arts. He currently lives and works in İstanbul.

Hakan Onur is an artist who creates new narratives that lie somewhere between cultural memory and history. He investigates how personal recollections become parts of sociocultural history and how they come to dominate us through the language and symbols employed by the powers that be. His findings are the materials from which he creates works of conceptual art ranging from paintings to installations. In the artist’s own words “Just as our futures bear the imprint of our past inner adventures, our memories scattered this way and that between feelings of strangeness and familiarity call upon us to take the field in new games as we live out lives that are presented to us like the individual pieces of a puzzle. Each game is constructed from desires, losses, dreams, and apparitions. To play a game we must be willing to take the risk of losing control; but it is only by doing so that our history becomes an atlas of discovery.” To these playing-fields Hakan Onur brings ordinary words and images plucked from everyday life as he investigates what sort of awareness familiar situations actually create in people. Manipulating a vast array of information and signals plucked from sources ranging from graphic novels to history books and from color charts to maps, the artist creates works that call upon the viewer to participate in them intellectually.