Serkan Özkaya, 1973

Receiving an education in German language and literature as well as in fine art, Serkan Özkaya produces installations, performances, and sculptures. He forces prominent international art institutions to enter into dialogue with him, to mock their stultified, institutional existence. On one occasion, he wrote a letter to the Louvre Museum suggesting they hang the Mona Lisa upside down; on another he faxed the Philadelphia Museum of Art to inform them that his friend was about to take a piss in Duchamp’s urinal. Özkaya questions the originality and “sublime” nature of artworks by hand-copying the front pages of daily newspapers. He also creates edible artworks that are sold for the average price of a dessert in a restaurant. By eliminating the artistic distinctions between the original and its copy, between permanence and disposability and between the avant-garde and the popular, Özkaya obscures the meaning and production of art.

Serkan Özkaya’s sculpture installation, “Piano Elevated by Three Balloons”, brings into confrontation the concepts of weightiness and lightness in art, both literally and figuratively. Özkaya, who assumes a derisive and serious attitude in his ironic and provocative works, opposes the ponderousness of contemporary art concepts with naïve absurdity.