HELLENIC MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND RELIGIOUS AFFAIRS, CULTURE AND SPORTS
NATIONAL MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART
PRESS RELEASE
Dilek Winchester, A Solo Exhibition
Curated by Anna Kafetsi
Opening: October 31, 2012, at 20:00
Duration: October 31, 2012 - January 13, 2013
On Reading and Writing, 2007 (Installation)
The National Museum of Contemporary Art continuing its policy of showcasing
decentralized artistic quests in peripheries organizes a solo exhibition of the artist Dilek
Winchester, a major representative of a younger generation of artists to have emerged on
the Turkish art scene.
The exhibition will be inaugurated on October 31, 2012, and will run until January 13,
2013.
Born in 1974 in Istanbul where she presently lives and works, Winchester studied
painting at Central St. Martins College of Art and Design, London (BA, 1998); art, design,
and new media at the London Metropolitan University (MA, 2002), and sculpture at the
Fine Arts Academy, Marmara University (D.F.A., 2010). She has presented solo
exhibitions and has participated in collective performative work in public space in
Istanbul, London, Leipzig, etc. while her works have also been included in international
exhibitions such as: In Other Words, NGBK and Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanian, Berlin
(2012), Tarjama/Translation, The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University
(2010) and Queens Museum of Art, New York (2009), and Komşularla Konuşmalar
[Neighbors in Dialogue], Istanbul Collection for Ars Aevi, Galerija Collegium Artisticum,
Sarajevo (2008), etc.
As the Director of EMST Anna Kafetsi, curator of the exhibition, writes: “In her works,
installations, drawings, photographs, and videos there is a central preoccupation with
language, mainly in the form of the written word and the process of compiling linguistic
archives, while at the same time documentary techniques, with interviews and photographic
records, as well as 'ready-made' images found in archives and the internet, are used. The
artist's research focuses mainly on the late Ottoman past of Turkish literature of the 19 th
and 20th century, and especially on the use of different writings and alphabets from the
Karamanli and armenoturkish novel and play, written in Turkish language with the Greek
and Armenian alphabet respectively.
Simultaneously, her interest in language, as a common cultural and anthropological tool,
and her desire to render in words, physical expressions and metaphors the unsayable, lead
her to an endless, almost impossible search for definition, recording and classification of
human emotions in their diversity and enormous wealth. The associations that are born in
relation to the geometrical method of definition of emotions in Spinoza’s Ethics, as well as
with Wittgenstein's philosophical positions on language, broaden the interpretive
framework of her language-centered works.
Winchester brings to the foreground unknown until recently or marginalized texts of the
karamanli and armenoturkish literature, which as hybrids, written by Turkish speaking
writers of Greek and Armenian origin, where excluded from the Turkish literary canon,
retrieves from oblivion a multilingual past by rewriting often in her own hand, longforgotten alphabets, searches and records through translation processes and language
games secret and new relations between things/emotions and their name in daily language.
Through these creative practices she explores issues of national identity and
transculturality, examines and comments in a critical way, usually playful, relations of
language and ideology, art and politics.
In the exhibition eight works created in the last five years are presented, among which are
two new video-installations (Zevallı Delikanlı and Alphabets (Interviews) of 2012) shown
for the first time. Winchester's 2007 installation On Reading and Writing, a landmark work,
at the edge between fiction and reality, that summarizes the artist's essential research and
problematic, occupies a central position in the exhibition. On three blackboards the artist
transcribes with white chalk three passages written in Turkish language, written in the
Greek, Arabic and Armenian alphabet, which narrate this lingual “Babel” through the eyes
of a young child. The reference to the historic photograph that depicts Kemal Ataturk
presenting on a portable blackboard the new Latin alphabet of the newly-founded Turkish
Republic in 1928, is apparent to the visitor, and through it he can read the critical
commentary of the work on the violent rupture and the traumatic policies of the cultural
revolution against a rich multicultural Ottoman past”.
Opening hours
Tuesday-Sunday: 11:00-19:00
Thursday: 11:00-22:00
Monday: Closed
National Museum of Contemporary Art
The Athens Conservatory, 17-19 Vas. Georgiou II & Rigillis St., Athens 10675
Tel: 210 92.42.111 – 3, Fax: 210 92.45.200, protocol@emst.gr, pressoffice@emst.gr
www.emst.gr, http://fixit-emst.blogspot.com
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